Round and about

I’ve been a bit lazy about posting lately, so here are some edited highlights of the last week or so.

Richard Herring, at the Y Theatre in Leicester on Saturday, was terrific. Unfortunately, the place was only about half-full, but it didn’t deter him from doing a long set. On the surface, his on-stage persona and act come across as much less intellectual than his erstwhile comedy partner, Stewart Lee, and indeed he cheerfully describes his job as “being puerile and offensive on stage”. In fact, though, he ploughs a very similar furrow to Lee, with this particular show focusing on the fact that he’s reached 40 and feels that he’s wasted his life, not a world away from the territory Lee visited in his 41st Best Stand-up Ever show. Like Lee, too, his comedy is predominantly about (or at least, hinges on) the use and abuse of language – pedantry has rarely been so entertaining.

The rest of the weekend was a bit of a washout, but that did at least mean that I had plenty of time to do some work on a sequence of poems I’ve been writing about a hidden corner of 17th century history. The plan is, eventually, for Tom Bailey to do some photographs to go with them, and then…well, we haven’t got much past that point yet.

Yesterday I was out testing binoculars at Rutland Water. It’s always the way of such days that you don’t actually do much bird-watching, because you’re so busy worrying about stuff like depth of field and eye relief, but it was good to see a few flocks of Sand Martins arriving, plus good views of Sparrowhawk and Buzzard. On the way home, I called in at Swithland Reservoir for a quick look. I’d begun to get worried about the Peregrines, but one sped over the woods and landed on their favourite tree just as I was leaving, and the long-staying drake Smew was well worth seeing again. No sign of the Great White Egret resurfacing, though. I saw it for five minutes at Watermead Park on Thursday, but it hasn’t been refound since.

Cold comfort

I know this is going to sound like banging on about the same old point, but what on earth is this about? The poor poet and his work don't get a look in.

Weekend reading

Saturday’s Guardian review was the best in a long while, I thought. Partly because there was plenty of poetry-related material, although the long article on Carson McCullers was probably my favourite piece, having long been a fan of Ballad of the Sad Café and The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter.

This piece from Sean O’Brien was thought-provoking – it has certainly sparked debate at the Poets On Fire forum. I think the main thrust of his argument is pretty much fair enough, but I do wonder about that intro.

Elsewhere Nicholas Lezard chose Simon Armitage’s version of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight as his paperback choice. I suppose it feels less essential to me at the moment because I’ve already got three versions – by Tolkien, O’Donoghue and someone else whose name escapes me at the moment – but I’ll get round to buying it eventually, after a glowing recommendation like that.

There was a mini-review of the fine magazine The Dark Horse, which I notice features work from Irish poet Tom Duddy. His HappenStance chapbook is well worth £3 of anyone's money.

And last, but certainly not least, there was this fine review of Alison Brackenbury's new Carcanet collection, Singing In The Dark. I'd probably agree that the Nick Drake poems lack some of the tautness that characterises the rest of the book, but it's good to see a review that makes constructive criticisms, and it's a book that I'd recommend very highly.

Sphinx 8

Issue 8 of Sphinx arrived on Saturday, and a very good read it is too, with Gill McEvoy writing about her excellent, and now sold-out, HappenStance chapbook Uncertain Days, and a look at the increasingly impressive Cinnamon Press, among other goodies.

The emphasis is moving more towards articles on poetry chapbooks and chapbook presses, with most of the reviews now appearing straight on the website. I reviewed another enjoyable batch this issue, with my particular favourite being Jim C Wilson’s Paper Run, but there’s plenty for all tastes. Buy or subscribe now.

Troy Town - out now!

I'm delighted to be able to announce that my first full poetry collection, Troy Town, is available now from Arrowhead Press (well, the publication date is actually March 1st, which pleases my Welsh half no end). It's an 80-page hardback book, priced £8.99, and is available by following that Arrowhead link, or by emailing me here if you'd prefer.

Naturally, I'm absolutely thrilled, and I'm very grateful to Roger Collett and Joanna Boulter at Arrowhead, whose hard work made it possible, to Alison Brackenbury and Tom Jenks, who kindly read the manuscript for me and provided mini-reviews, to Tom Bailey, who provided a splendid cover pic, and to everyone else who has encouraged and helped me along the way.

The title, by the way, refers to one of the turf mazes that crop up here and there, usually on village greens, throughout the UK. Their layout was supposed to be based on the walls of Troy, although they were often known by other names, such as Julian's Bower. No one's exactly sure what the mazes were created for, although it's more likely they were there as part of the May Day games than for any ritual or religious purpose. But whatever - the term also came to mean a state of pleasant confusion, and perhaps that's the angle that most strongly appealed to me.

Finally, I've decided to create a temporary satellite blog, imaginatively titled Troy Town, to deal with all manner of news, reviews and background material relating to the book. Polyolbion, meanwhile, will continue on its meandering way.

Lighten up!

Light verse gets a pretty raw deal, I think, so it’s good to see the first issue of Lighten Up Online go live. It’s the brainchild of Martin Parker, whose work I recommend highly – it’s genuinely funny, beautifully constructed, and frequently much darker than it might appear at first sight.

The e-zine has got some excellent contributors on board – Helena Nelson, George Simmers, Matt Harvey and DA Prince, to name a few – so it’s well worth a long look. Expect it to go from strength to strength...

All change

I got my Poetry Superhighway Great Poetry Exchange ‘draw’ yesterday – my own chapbook is going to be heading to Tom Berman, on a kibbutz in Israel, while I’ll be getting Thawed Stars, by Alice Pero. I have to admit, I’m quietly excited, because her book comes highly recommended by no less a figure than Kenneth Koch, my favourite of the New York School poets. It’s also 140-odd pages long, which would make it quite the largest chapbook you’ve ever seen.

Umbrella Issue 6

Umbrella is one of the best-looking, and most readable online poetry mags around, IMHO, and the Spring 2008 issue is no exception. There's loads of great poetry and prose in there, and I'm delighted to have a poem - Show, Don't Tell - featured in the Milestones section.

Quakes, books, etc

It's been quite an eventful few days. Wednesday morning, I was woken at 1am by the earthquake. At 5.2 on the Richter Scale, pretty small fry by global standards, but certainly a bigger deal than the last one I remember, which arrived on a Sunday afternoon and barely rattled the glasses in the Pump and Tap. This one rumbled and shook the house properly, rattling wardrobe doors and shaking shelves and furniture.

I've also been over in Wales (and by the way, a belated happy St David's Day to all), although to be fair Hay on Wye is only a couple of hundred yards over the border. It is, of course, a town that carries great dangers for anyone who already has a huge mountain of Books They Mean To Read. Still, in between a bit of birding (Buzzards and Dippers, mainly), and some hill-walking, I bravely walked straight into bookshop after bookshop in search of bargains. And my haul?

Collected Poems - RS Thomas (as I said a little while back, it's time I got a decent overview of this wonderful poet's work)
Later Collected Poems - RS Thomas
A Robin Hood Book - Alan Halsey (I have, of course, a Robin Hood fixation, and this strange little book is excellent. It's poetic prose, I suppose, blurring fact, fiction, politics and history in a highly readable fashion).
Skevington's Daughter - Oliver Reynolds (I bought Reynolds' The Oslo Tram years ago in a secondhand shop, and remain rather fond of it, so this was a no-brainer at £1)
The Player Queen's Wife - Oliver Reynolds (ditto)
Rounding The Horn: Selected Poems - John Stallworthy (I don't know much of Stallworthy's work, but this looked a must-have at £3)
Ill Met By Moonlight - W Stanley Moss (an account of real-life escapades in German-occupied Crete. The author's comrade in all this was Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose books I've probably raved about before)
The Twelve Days - George Malcolm Thomson (a 1960s account of the immediate lead-up to the Great War. It's superbly written, and what comes across especially is just how much imprecise use of language contributed to a crisis snowballing out of control)
God's Englishman - Christopher Hill (excellent biography of Oliver Cromwell which I read at school and again at university)

OK, so the last thing I need is more books, but given that only the Halsey book was full price, I was pretty pleased with that lot.

In between times, I went up to the Gospel Pass and down the Llanthony Valley, which is the kind of place that rightfully belongs in fairy tales and fantasy novels. It would be terrible if vast hordes of tourists did discover such a secluded, unspoiled spot, but if you're ever in the area, make sure you have a look.

Happening poetry

Not getting much time to post at the moment (for entirely selfish, pleasure-seeking reasons), but this post on Jane Holland's blog Raw Light, and the original Guardian article that it mentions, make very interesting reading. More later, perhaps...

Eaten by a lion in Skegness

I'm off work next week, and plan to get over to North Norfolk early on to do a bit of birding. Drive along the coast road towards Sheringham, and just before you get to the 'most birdwatched parish in Britain', Cley, you go through the little village of Stiffkey, which never fails to remind me of the story of Harold Davidson.

Actually, it's not quite as bizarre as it's often billed (The Vicar Who Was Eaten By A Lion In Skegness), but it's pretty odd nonetheless. Killed by a lion out on the African savannah would at least have a romantic, heroic tinge to it. Skeggy may be many things, but romantic and heroic it isn't.

Curlews

All this frost and fog seems to have had mixed effects on the birds. In the garden, they're more visible than ever, with the cold forcing them to look to feeders as the best source of sustenance. Out and about on the patch, though, certain species have gone missing - Little Grebes, for instance, on the smaller (now frozen) ponds, such as those at Kelham Bridge, one of my regular haunts. On Sunday, there were at least two Water Rail there, good numbers of winter thrushes, plus Lapwings and Golden Plovers in the skies nearby, but otherwise only a couple of Snipe and a few Coot and Moorhen.

Looking back through my notebooks from previous years, I noticed that this week is usually when the first Curlew appear back in the area, usually stopping off for a couple of days at sites such as Sence Valley Forest Park, before presumably pushing on further north (perhaps much further north). Where they've wintered, I'm not sure. The south coast, maybe, or a warm-ish estuary on the French coast?

It's also noticeable, though, that there's a second, much later influx of Curlews, this time on the higher ground around Charnwood Forest. Oddly enough I always seem to see them first on Easter Monday, although that's presumably because that's when I happen to be travelling in such parts, rather than because they're a particular sect of Curlews who have decided to regulate their movements according to the dictates of medieval church councils.

There's been talk in the past about possible breeding, and certainly at one regular site (a large pasture) I've seen a couple of pairs displaying for the last two or three springs. But whatever, it's got so that their strange, ecstatic bubbling call, or the sight of their gull-like flight, is a better indication of the arrival of spring round these parts than the first Sand Martin, say. I reckon they'll be around by the weekend, bringing warmer times with them.

So Here We Are 10

The latest of David Caddy's Poetic Letters From England is available to listen to here, while as usual, a text version can be found at David's blog.

It's a timely look at Basil Bunting's work, because I'm pretty sure that Faber have Bunting's Collected Poems coming out in the next couple of months. Another essential volume to find the money for!

Poetry and the presidents

I've only just come across this article. Interesting stuff, not least that description of the Gettysburg Address as one of the finest prose poems in the English language. Hard to disagree.

The 41st Best Stand-up Ever

I went along to the Y Theatre in Leicester last night with some friends, to see Stewart Lee, appearing as part of the 15th Leicester Comedy Festival. He was performing the show (The 41st Best Stand-up Ever) that he took to last year's Edinburgh Festival, and he was as good as ever.

Quite why he's been absent from our TV screens (bar the very occasional, very brief, appearance) for so long remains a mystery, because he puts most British stand-ups in the shade. As I've said before, it's not so much the material, however thought-provoking and intelligent it is. It's all in the delivery. I suppose it all comes under the heading of 'comedy timing', but Lee uses silence and repetition to wonderful effect.

Funnily enough, his old comedy partner Richard Herring is at the Y in a month's time, so I'll be going along to that too, to see what he's been up to in the years since Fist Of Fun and TMWRNJ.

Current reading

The Peregrine - JA Baker
The Hill Of Dreams - Arthur Machen
Singing In The Dark - Alison Brackenbury
Bloodfeud: Murder And Revenge In Anglo-Saxon England - Richard Fletcher

A pictorial interlude

A couple of people mentioned they liked that Red Kite pic on the last post, so here's a few more pics from the bloke who took it, colleague Mike Weedon's blog, Weedon's World of Nature.

First, a mist-net of spiders' webs thrown over the fenland landscape...


...next, a splendidly fiery-eyed Black-necked Grebe at Orton Brick Pit, Peterborough...


...and finally, a piratical Kestrel attempting to relieve a Barn Owl of his supper up on Deeping High Bank.

Poetry and biography

I finished Byron Rogers’ excellent The Man Who Went Into The West last night, and thoroughly entertaining as it is, I’m not sure I’m any nearer forming a proper opinion on RS Thomas (pictured).

I often have a bit of a problem with literary biographies, especially where poets are concerned. Even if the poet has co-operated, they too often seem to encourage the tendency to see everything the writer produced as directly autobiographical, and there’s also the danger that the details of the writer’s private life become more important than the work they produced. The most extreme example is probably Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but there are others.

I thought I’d give Rogers the benefit of the doubt, though, partly because I loved his biography of one of my literary heroes, J L Carr (he must like writers who insist on only using their initials). I’m glad I did, too, because it’s a fine book, being unafraid to criticise Thomas where necessary, and to point out all the contradictions in this deeply complex man. And, importantly, it makes the effort to keep the writer and the man separate.

That’s probably more important than ever with someone like Thomas, because as I say, the phrase “a mass of contradictions” might have been coined with him in mind. His vehement support of the Welsh language was balanced by the fact that he wrote all his poetry in English, and spoke with such a cut-glass English accent that lots of Welsh neighbours and parishioners were unaware that he was actually Welsh born and bred. He even seems to have preferred the company of middle-class English incomers a lot of the time. He was a committed Christian pacifist, yet at times came dangerously close to espousing unconditional support for violent protest against the eradication of Welsh culture. And I couldn’t help feeling a bit uneasy at times about just how far Thomas took this ‘Wales for the Welsh’ mentality – a keen birdwatcher, he played a role in conservation of the Red Kite (it’s difficult now, when I sometimes see half a dozen on my way to work each day, to remember just how close it was to becoming extinct in the UK), but resigned his RSPB membership when it was decided to introduce foreign Red Kites to bolster the Welsh population and encourage its spread. There are genuine ecological reasons to want to keep a separate British population, but I'm not sure he had those in mind.

Then there’s the religion. He spent his life as a vicar for The Church In Wales (in a country which is predominantly nonconformist), and yet seems to have had what can best be described as a very troubled relationship with God. But that’s the most absorbing and moving aspect of the book, I think. Thomas took on the one hand a very pragmatic approach (he felt that he was employed by the Church, and so had no business in challenging any of its beliefs from the pulpit), while at the same time channelling his spiritual search and his struggles with his faith into some wonderful poetry. A lot of the time, in the poetry at least, the search became more important than easy answers.

And there’s the question of humour. The popular image of him, fuelled by newspaper profiles which were usually accompanied by photos of him in a windswept, wild-haired pose, was of a painfully serious, taciturn and often downright rude man. Rogers makes no attempt to gloss over any of this, but he does bring out the nervousness and shyness that contributed to it, as well as showing that Thomas could be very funny, in a dry, offbeat way.

I suppose, more than anything, the biography will encourage me to go out there and buy more of Thomas’s poetry, because it never loses sight of the fact that it was, in itself, always more important to Thomas than the purely personal, religious and political spheres. I’ve got a couple of anthologies, with largely the same well-known pieces, but he wrote such a mass of poems that it’s time I checked them out. Bloodaxe, I think, do several volumes of Collecteds, so I’ll have to have a look for them, probably when I’m in Hay on Wye in a few weeks.

Now I’m about to start reading J A Baker’s classic The Peregrine. I’m ashamed never to have read it before, but it comes very highly recommended from all quarters, and is one of those books that genuinely completely changed the face of an entire genre.

100 Books Of Poetry

Good post here over on Very Like A Whale - the more I think about it, the more I think what Ron Silliman says (and he does say he's not at all certain) is not that unreasonable. Do a university course on any subject, and you might be expected to have a decent overview of the subject and to show a bit of willing. He's not saying you've got to know all 100 off by heart, after all. Or like them, for that matter.

Just released

Today's poem on Lesley Duncan's blog at The Herald is by Alison Brackenbury. Coincidentally, when I got home late last night, my copy of Alison's new book, Singing In The Dark, had arrived from Carcanet. I only had time to flick it open and read a couple of poems, but it looks excellent, so I'll be getting into it over the weekend.

Swap shop time again!

It's that time of year again, when you can sign up to the Poetry Super Highway Great Poetry Exchange, and broaden your poetry horizons a little.

It's dead simple. If you have a chapbook out (it has to be a physical object - no e-books allowed), you agree to send a copy of it to one of the other participants, drawn at random. You, in turn, receive a book from someone else altogether.

I've done it for the past two years, and struck lucky both times, first with Matt Mason's When The Bough Breaks, then last year with LouAnn Muhm's Dear Immovable. Both were very fine books, so I can recommend it. A lot of the poets involved are in the USA, but there are also a fair few Brits and other nationalities, and part of the fun is having no idea where you're going to receive a book from.

There's still plenty of time to sign up, so give it a go.

Voicing concerns

Reading that RS Thomas biography last night, I came across an interesting passage about his style in his middle period, and how it was viewed with suspicion by a number of critics, notably the ‘Movement’ figures Donald Davie and John Wain. They particularly took exception to his extensive use of enjambement, feeling that he overused it, making his rhythms awkward. Thomas, for his part, felt that he was using his line-breaks very carefully to emphasise certain words, and Byron Rogers points out that there’s no awkwardness of rhythm in the poems in question when you listen to Thomas himself reading them.

All of which throws up some interesting questions. Whether or not you actually intend to perform your poetry to an audience, you write with the idea of hearing the poem out loud. Sound is as important as sense. But when you’re writing, should you hear it exclusively in your voice, or in a more neutral tone? What you decide has implications not only for rhythm, but also for things like rhyme. My own accent, for example, would rhyme “again” with “then”, but clearly a lot of other accents wouldn’t. So do you go with your own voice (literally), or with a more universal one?

Having read about that brush with Movement orthodoxy, it was interesting to come across this piece earlier today. I found myself agreeing with quite a lot of what AN Wilson said. I enjoyed doing Larkin at school (The Whitsun Weddings), but I now tend to be pretty selective about his poems. I think it’s probably that the gloom is a bit unrelenting. That can also be true of the likes of Geoffrey Hill, or RS Thomas for that matter, but in the case of the latter especially it’s mitigated by the sense that the spiritual search that is going on becomes the most important thing in itself, even as Thomas is hinting that there’s a lot of emptiness at the end of it.

Wilson’s article also, of course, raises interesting questions about the gap between a poet’s work and their personal life, which I’ll come back to when I write about the Thomas book in detail.

Finally, the biography mentions an interesting anecdote about the seventh century Saint Beuno, who was out walking one morning, heard a man calling to his dogs in an unfamiliar tongue (English) on the far side of the Severn, and promptly packed up and moved to the Lleyn Peninsula, predicting doom for the Welsh. Something of an extreme, not to say defeatist, reaction, you might think, but they were an excitable lot, those dark age saints, no doubt partly down to living in isolated spots while subsisting on meagre rations which must have included a fair amount of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. Anyone who’s read Felix’s Life of St Guthlac (he holed up on the island of Crowland, just down the road from here, in the fens) will know that large parts of it are one long bad trip. Still, that’s what makes them so fascinating, too, and that’s why the Early British Kingdoms website is such a great resource.

PS. While we’re on the subject of Wales, a quick mention of Saturday’s Six Nations match (although I prefer Rugby League, if I’m honest). I’m half-Welsh, but being English-born have to cheer England when the two meet, so I should have been depressed by what transpired. All I’ll say, though, is that’s what happens when you send out an England side containing just one Leicester player (and he was gone after about 15 minutes). Asking for trouble.

Ploughing on...

The results of the 2007 Plough Prize have been announced, and you can read the winners and comments by the judge, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, on the website.

It's a competition that goes from strength to strength, not least because it offers entrants an awful lot for their entry fee, I think. This year, every poem entered got a tickbox critique, and for a small extra fee, you could get a full critique (and take it from me, they're excellent).

I was involved in doing some of the long and shortlisting this year, and in doing tickbox critiques, and thoroughly enjoyed the process, not least because it made me think hard about what makes a poem work, or at least what makes a poem work for me. It also surprised me just how many poems were in the 'nearly, but not quite there' category. That is, they were spoiled only by one seemingly small factor, which nevertheless proved impossible to ignore. Usually, it was a failure of nerve on the poet's part, and a consequent tendency to overstate their case or signpost what they saw as the significant parts of the poem. But on the whole, I think it was encouraging to see just how much good work was submitted.

I spent the weekend on the sofa, deciding that taking it easy was the best bet after all this kidney infection brouhaha. As a result, I did no birding, but I did write an awful lot (about time, after a pretty thin January), and read most of Byron Rogers' splendid biography of RS Thomas, of which much more later in the week.

Finally, a thank-you to PJ Nolan for plugging my chapbook on his blog, PJ Nolan Online, which is my recommended browsing for today.

IWP 2007

On the subject of photographs, here are some great images from the International Wildbird Photographer Awards 2007, the results of which are in the February issue of Bird Watching. The winner, Danny Green's picture of a single Grey Plover in a sea of Knot at Snettisham, is superb, and as you can see he was up against some great competition. Enjoy...

All change!

Time for a bit of redecorating, I think. Having upgraded my browser, I'm going to post a few more pics and videos on here in future...