New review

It was a very pleasant surprise to find a full-page review of Troy Town, by Ewen McDonald, in the autumn edition of The Leicestershire Magazine. I've put it up over at my Troy Town blog, so you can read it in full there.

Forward Poetry Prize

Earlier today I got an invitation to the presentation of the Forward Poetry Prize, and the accompanying launch of The Forward Book Of Poetry 2009. Joanna Boulter, of Arrowhead Press, had already tipped me off that one of the poems from Troy Town, and one from fellow Arrowheader Peter Howard's Weighing The Air, were to be included in the anthology, but it's really very exciting to actually have the invitation card in my hand. And of course, the chance to go and sip wine and eat cheese footballs with the great and good of the poetry world is too good to miss, so I'll be there in Fitzroy Square on October 8th.

The full nominations are:

MAIN PRIZE
Jamie McKendrick - Crocodiles & Obelisks (Faber)
Sujata Bhatt - Pure Lizard (Carcanet)
Mick Imlah - The Lost Leader (Faber)
Jane Griffiths - Another Country (Bloodaxe)
Jen Hadfield - Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe)
Catherine Smith - Lip (Smith Doorstop)

FIRST COLLECTION
Simon Barraclough - Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt)
Andrew Forster - Fear of Thunder (Flambard)
Frances Leviston - Public Dream (Picador)
Allison McVety - The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith Doorstop)
Stephanie Norgate - Hidden River (Bloodaxe)
Kathryn Simmonds - Sunday at the Skin Launderette (Seren)

SINGLE POEM
Seamus Heaney - Cutaways
Christopher Buehlman - Wanton
Catherine Ormell - Campaign Desk, December 1812
Don Paterson - Love Poem for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze
Kate Rhodes - Wells-next-the-Sea
Tim Turnbull - Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn

My own choices of winners (and I haven't read all the nominees by any means), would be Catherine Smith, Kathryn Simmonds and Tim Turnbull, but I suspect it may pan out rather differently. Still, they're all worthy nominees, so it will be fascinating to see who does win.

HappenStance launch

Yesterday I went to the launch of two of the latest HappenStance publications - Marilyn Ricci's chapbook Rebuilding A Number 39, and DA Prince's first full collection, Nearly The Happy Hour - in Leicester.

It was good to meet Marilyn, and to see Davina and HappenStance publisher Helena Nelson again, and the excellent turn-out on another day of foul weather was testament to a strong grass-roots poetry scene in Leicester.

Both poets read very well. It's interesting that a couple of Davina's poems concern swans, because her poems remind me of that old thing about appearing serene and elegant on the surface, while all sorts of things are going on just out of sight. It's all far more complicated than it first appears, but she uses the rhythms of everyday speech very well, so it's never difficult. She also writes very good light verse - an underrated skill, in my book. I should also point out that we both went to the same school, years apart, so it's good to be able to cheer her success.

Marilyn's writing is often grounded in family memory, and both she and Helena pointed out that, while that sort of thing is sometimes derided by poetry critics, there's no reason why it should be, when it's done well. It was here - for a start there's plenty of character in the poems, with everyday (Leicester) speech well captured*. There's also a sparingly used surrealism, which gives several of the poems an element of surprise. And finally, you're plunged right into the middle of the memory so that, I suppose, it's rather like recalling them yourself, rather than being told them by somebody else.

* One poem, Yakking, uses the title word in a sense that is, in my experience, exclusive to Leicester and its environs. To 'yak' means to throw, usually quite violently, and although a lot of local dialect words seem to be passing out of use, this is one I still hear (and use) regularly, not least on the cricket field. It's always been a source of annoyance to me that our accent and dialect gets so badly represented in the media. On the rare occasions that a TV programme is set in Leicester, for example, they generally use a Birmingham accent, but the reality is quite different. You can hear a huge difference between Nuneaton, on the Brum side of Watling Street, and Hinckley, only three or four miles away on the Leicester side of what I've always thought is a big linguistic divide, almost certainly down to the fact that we were part of the old Danelaw. In fact, we were more heavily settled by the Vikings than just about anywhere in England, as evidenced by all those Leicester surnames like Kettle, Herrick and Askill.

Hare care

This discussion of Charlotte Mew’s The Farmer’s Bride has been going on at the Guardian books blog this week. It’s a fine poem, I think, and well worth a close reading. I don’t share the reservations of some about the attempt to capture the farmer’s speech, and I don’t think it goes too far towards pathos. But I was interested too by some of the other directions the discussion takes – hares and their mythological connections (they're my favourite British mammal*, although it was only fairly recently I read that the Brown Hare is non-native - it was the Mountain Hare the Celts were thinking of); the wonderful folk song The Bonny Black Hare (I've written about Fairport Convention's version before); and Ian Duhig's equally fine poem The Lammas Hireling - it's all worth reading.

* I don't see too many, although the wide, rolling fields around Blatherwycke in Northants always seem to turn up a few when I'm out Red Kite watching. But earlier this year, as I was driving along the narrow lane from Eyebrook Reservoir towards Stockerston, a young Hare was sitting in the road. It showed no inclination to move, and I wondered if it was injured. But it finally slipped through the fence, and then waited as I pulled alongside, and was able to watch it from a few feet away. Eventually, it proved its rude health to my satisfaction by exploding into a lightning fast dash across the field to cover.

Sterna hirundo

I dodged heavy showers to do a bit of birding on the way home last night. Cossington Meadows was quiet, with no sign of the Whinchats that have been around, and only relatively few Lapwings, plus two Green Sandpipers.

I stopped for a quick scan on the dam at Cropston Reservoir, too, and as well as a couple of Little Egrets along the shoreline, there was a family of Common Terns hanging around the observation tower. The parents were swooping and diving, and occasionally coming up with fish, which they then fed to two youngsters perched on the rails of the walkway out to the tower. These young terns looked fully as big as their parents, but their plumage lacked the neatness of the older birds, with a gingery barring on their upperparts and ‘dirty’ heads.

I’d guess that they’ll be off on their mammoth migration to the southern oceans any day now, so it was slightly surprising to see the young not doing their own fishing (although both flew strongly at times). But it seems to have been a good year for the local Common Terns – I’ve seen more than usual, I think.

Competition time

I received this from Poetry Nottingham editor Adrian Buckner. Have a go - I've sketched something out, and far from feeling constrained by the imposed beginning, I think it took me somewhere I wouldn't otherwise have gone...

Poetry Competition (with a difference, or two)

RULES:
1. Your poem must begin with:
She lay on the lounger, watching
the rabbit nuzzle the lobelia
2. There is no line limit
3. Only one entry per person
4. Closing date: 3rd October 2008
5. Entry fee is 66p in postage attached to an unaddressed A5 envelope
6. Entries can be typed or handwritten.
7. Name and address must appear on the manuscript.
8. Entries to: Adrian Buckner, Poetry Nottingham, 11 Orkney Close, Stenson Fields, Derby DE24 3LW

YOU MAY:
1. Include your entry along with other poems to be considered for inclusion in Poetry Nottingham. (Entry fee still applies)
2. Alter the lineation of the required opening.
3. Inform everyone in your family, creative writing class, writers’ workshop, about this ground-breaking venture/editor’s whimsy and encourage them to enter.

PRIZES:
1. The best two entries in the opinion of the editor will appear in the next issue of Poetry Nottingham (winners to be informed prior to publication)
2. The winners will also receive a year’s subscription to Poetry Nottingham or, if already subscribing, a year’s extension to their subscription.

Today's selection

Following on from my post earlier in the week about James W Wood's excellent chapbook Inextinguishable, his poem Afternoon Nap, from that book, is today's featured poem on Poetry Daily. Rob Mackenzie has also posted about it over at Surroundings.

I meant to mention earlier in the week, that I went off to look up the word 'knucker', as in Knucker Press, publishers of James' pamphlet. It's a dialect word for a kind of water dragon, from the Anglo-Saxon 'nicor', which crops up in Beowulf. Apparently there are reputed 'knucker holes' at various places in Sussex.

Now I think about it, I dimly remember, in the 80s, there being a dragon called The Knucker in the story Slaine the Barbarian, in 2000AD comic.

Derwent Poetry Festival

Last year I went up to Matlock for the first Derwent Poetry Festival, run by Templar Poetry, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

This year’s festival takes place over the weekend of October 17th-19th, at Masson Mills, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire. It will feature the launch of 10 new poetry titles from Templar Poetry, including the presentation of the 2008 Templar Poetry Pamphlets Prizes.

It is accompanied by readings from Paul Farley, Tim Liardet, Jane Weir, Pat Winslow, Rob Hindle, Dawn Wood, Siobhan Campbell, Mike Barlow, Angela Cleland, Pat Borthwick, Katrina Naomi and many others. There is a festival bookshop, stands from magazines and an exhibition of paintings by Artist in Residence Karen Isherwood.

I might struggle to make it this time, as I’m scheduled to be out of the country working that weekend, but it’s all a bit up in the air at the moment so if I am at home, I’ll get along. I particularly liked Rob Hindle’s reading last year, but there was plenty of other good stuff and Matlock Bath is a pretty nice place to be on a fine autumn day.

The full festival programme is listed at: www.templarpoetry.co.uk or you can call the box office on 01629 582 500.

End of an era

You have sporting heroes for a wide range of reasons. As a kid, my cricketing idol was David Gower, probably precisely because I knew I’d never be able to bat even remotely like him. After all, no one can. He might have infuriated some pundits because of his perceived lack of application (I’d argue that was rubbish, but it’d take too long just now), but he was one of those sportsmen for whom that hackneyed old cliché “poetry in motion” might have been devised. My other (English) childhood hero was Derek Randall, who had none of Gower’s style, but bags of guts and character. You could identify with ‘Arkle’, or ‘Rags’, as he called himself.

This week, another hero of mine and cricketing legend announced he’s finally bowing out of county cricket after 25 years. As Andrew Miller says here, Graeme Hick fully deserves that title, however disappointing his test career was.

It’s all relative, though. Yes, he never developed into the batsman many thought he could be (the name Bradman even got mentioned in his early years, and certainly people thought he might be another Viv Richards). But on the other hand, there were times when, judged by the standards of the other players around him in the England side, he deserved high praise rather than criticism. Quite apart from his batting, his off-spin was underused by captains, and his superb fielding at slip or in the deep was too rarely factored into the equation when he was being made the scapegoat for another England failure. As Miller says, the security of a central contract might have brought the best out of him, because poor man management, especially by Mike Atherton, certainly did him no favours. What Miller says about that incident at Sydney doesn’t tally with Alec Stewart’s recent account of it, which suggested Atherton (I’ll admit, I’ve always thought him overrated, as a captain especially) stitched Hick up. If he’d done it to someone less mild-mannered, he’d still be picking bat splinters out of his back even now.

Other critics have described Hick as a ‘flat-track bully’, or his batting as mechanical. Again I’d argue, because what they saw as mechanical was just a refreshing simplicity, hitting straight and hard wherever possible. And he played plenty of good knocks on less than great wickets, against the best in the world. He just never quite believed in himself at the top level.

Miller makes good points about how Hick was always happiest at Worcester, and perhaps the last of the great old-fashioned county players, and it’s worth remembering how much he contributed to the success of that late 80s Worcester side. But I wish he’d gone on to point out more clearly just why so many English fans hold him in high regard – his honesty, modesty and supreme unselfishness, the latter shown in the way he was shunted in and out of the England side, and up and down the batting order, without a murmur of complaint.

I’ve seen him play loads of great innings over the years (and I’m not a Worcester fan, by the way), but my enduring memory will be of a day in December 2000. England were on the up. Duncan Fletcher, who had discovered Hick in Zimbabwe in the early 80s and then captained him, was the new England coach and gave him another chance. He responded well at first, but by the end of the series in Pakistan he looked like he might be on his way out once and for all.

I was watching on the TV at work as England were chasing 176 to win at Karachi, and it was getting dark. Really dark. Pakistan used delaying tactics to try to salvage a draw, but ultimately just made life harder for their own baffled fielders. Still, when Hick came in, there was plenty left to do. A lesser man might have started worrying about his own place at this stage, playing with one eye on his average. Not Hick. He got stuck straight into the bowling, allowing Graham Thorpe to play the anchor role, and saw England right to the brink of victory. Atherton, Thorpe and others took the plaudits, and two tests later, Hick was gone for good. That was him all over, though – a great team man who was happiest out of the spotlight. As Andrew Miller says, county cricket will certainly never see his like again, and it'll be a poorer place without him. There's rumours that he'll enjoy a last big pay day in one of the Indian leagues, in which case good luck to him - he deserves a good send-off.

Inextinguishable - James W Wood

Inextinguishable
James W Wood (Knucker Press, www.knuckerpress.com)
If you enjoyed James Wood’s 2006 HappenStance chapbook The Theory Of Everything half as much as I did, then you’re probably not going to take too much convincing to buy this, his latest pamphlet, a handsome full-colour publication matching the response of 13 artists to his poems. So, my apologies if you’re already converted, because I’m going to preach to you anyway (something the poems never do, incidentally).

The first thing to say is that this collection represents significant progress from an already impressive starting point. That HappenStance pamphlet was notable for the sheer variety it offered, with Wood leavening the more serious, resonant moments by taking off at all sorts of playful tangents. The poems in Inextinguishable, on the other hand, are much more homogenous, the better to carry their considerable elegiac weight.

And carry it they do. The first poem, An Fraoch Mhor, sets the tone simply but movingly, both looking back to the past and imploring “Let memory go now”, and several of the other pieces here explore that tension – on the one hand, wanting to do justice to people and places past, on the other, wanting to move on into an uncertain future.

Fine craftsman that Wood is, he knows just when to deploy that plain, unvarnished style elsewhere. The Craws, for example, contains the lines:
“…You were
no prize-winner, sportsman or great thinker,
just a man like any other, and one
whose life asks us for little grieving.”

The emotional impact of the poem is all the greater for that willingness to speak a simple, unvarnished truth, to do much more than a little grieving without ever slipping into sentimentality, an effect that’s replicated elsewhere.

Another favourite was Catherine Wheel, an elegy which closes with the fine:
“…you were
a Catherine Wheel blazing brilliantly

in a ploughed field at midsummer, a spark
that might have cloaked us all in fire
if only we could have seen it.”

And the final poem, The Orchestra Plays Nielsen’s ‘Inextinguishable’, serves to gently but firmly restate what we’ve already taken from what’s gone before:
“music is life, and like it, inextinguishable.
A principle
for every anxious soul to follow,
forged and hammered in our heart’s crucible,
the beat that trips and will not rest,
all things in ebb and flow.”

Taken on their own, these poems add up to a very strong chapbook collection, so maybe I saw the artists’ responses as something of a pleasant but inessential bonus. Perhaps a few too many seem to interpret Wood’s words a little too literally, but I liked Jaimie Lane’s By The Station Café, Fiona Purves’ Thirteen and Elizabeth Walker’s Catherine Wheel in particular.

But it’s the poems that I really want to talk about. Buy them, read them, and wonder when this man is going to get the full collection his talents deserve.

Killer Bob (Browning)

I’ve posted on here before about my unease when a poet’s work is interpreted as being wholly autobiographical. I can’t imagine that’s ever the case, even with ‘confessional’ poets. Poetry is, after all, art, and as such contains imagination and fictions.

With that in mind I meant to link to this piece in The Guardian a few weeks back, which seemed to me to carry that autobiographical notion to absurd extremes. I didn’t, because I was too lazy, but I opened today’s Guardian to find that Sheffield poet Geraldine Monk had done my work for me (and done it far better than I could).

Her letter reads:
“I read Elizabeth Lowry’s article about Robert Browning (“Portrait of a lady”, July 19) with mounting incredulity. To adduce murder from a poet’s writings is as serious as it is shallow. My last volume of poetry contains monologues and imaginary letters by Mary Queen of Scots. I have never once harboured any desire to murder either my husband or the Queen.”

Says it all, really. I bet it won’t deter the next would-be literary detective, though.

Going live

Time for a bit of self-advertising. I'll be reading as part of the Zest! Open Floor Poetry Night, at Alexander's Jazz Theatre Bar, Chester, at 8pm on Monday, September 22nd. I'll also have plenty of copies of Making The Most Of The Light and Troy Town available, so I'll work out a little package deal.

As the title of the event suggests, there's also an open mic spot, so you can bring along your own or a favourite poem to read (I like that idea of having a few 'cover versions' at a poetry reading).

The venue is in Rufus Court, off Northgate Street, and entry is £3/£2. See you there.

The Fifth DH Lawrence Festival

The DH Lawrence Festival – held in and around Eastwood – started on August 15th and runs until September 11th. Brochures can be ordered by calling 01773 717353.

The Festival includes introductory material on Lawrence, events for specialists, a photography exhibition on mining, family events and walks round Lawrence's old stomping ground, "the country of my heart".

Less Lawrentian events include a drawing workshop with the man who did the Harry Potter drawings and a family history session. On September 9th there is a talk on dialect in Lawrence's work and a guided walk round Greasley on September 7th.

Prynne at Litterbug

I've been doing a bit of browsing over at Litterbug, poet and publisher Alan Baker's excellent blog. Take the time to go down the page (at least as far as July 13th), and there's all sorts of interesting discussion of JH Prynne. I'd have to say that on first reading I found myself sympathising with CJ Allen's piece, but then I'm coming at it from an angle of almost total ignorance, which is never a good thing, is it?

I find myself wanting to know more, wanting to read more, and then getting put off by the thought of paying money for a book that might, judging by some of the comments there, get tossed into the corner for years after an initial burst of enthusiasm. So where's a good, and cheap, starting place for Prynne? Any ideas?

It's April 1st, right?

First Jeremy Paxman lays into him in an ill-considered and ignorant mini-rant, and now this. What did Burns do to deserve all this?

Still, at least Jacko and his mate are fans of Scotland's national bard, and it's certainly not the first time his poems have been set to music. Will we ever get to hear them, though? Don't bet on it.

Another quick reminder...

A week on Saturday, two new HappenStance poetry publications by Leicestershire poets will be launched – D A Prince’s Nearly The Happy Hour, a first book-length collection for both author and publisher, and Rebuilding A Number 39, by Marilyn Ricci, the author’s first chapbook collection. Come along and listen and celebrate the launch, and talk to the poets and HappenStance publisher Helena Nelson in person.

It's on Saturday, September 6th, at 2.45 for 3pm, at the Friends’ Meeting House, 16 Queens Road (junction with Victoria Park Road), Leicester LE2 1WP. Email nell@happenstancepress.com if you plan to attend. I'll see you there.

The Bestiary - Sam Meekings

The Bestiary
Sam Meekings (Polygon, 2008, £7.99)
You see a lot of talk these days about the extent to which poetry collections need a connecting thread, theme, arc - call it what you will.
My own feeling is that, while such binding agents can often add hugely to the success of a collection, they’re by no means essential. The more old-fashioned, ‘greatest hits’ type of approach (or rather, simply bringing together the best of a poet’s most recent poems) can work just as well for me too.
All this is by way of ponderously getting round to saying that Sam Meekings’ debut collection seems like a perfect example of how to link together poems that aren’t, strictly speaking, a sequence, but aren’t stand-alone efforts either.
As the title suggests, it’s nature that is the common element throughout, although Meekings is at least as interested in fish, amphibians, invertebrates and the shifting borders between land and sea as the birds and animals beloved of so many poets (I plead guilty). There’s a fascination with all sorts of textures and smells (the slimier and ranker the better – slime is a word that crops up regularly throughout), and a gift for rendering them real to the reader, that recalls not only Hughes, but also early Heaney, an impression that’s reinforced by Meekings’ preference for regular forms.
He uses plenty of end rhyme too, with a rare subtlety and musicality, and similarly the links he makes from his apparent subjects to human concerns are generally understated, often only apparent after a few reads.
Very occasionally, I’ll admit, he overdoes it and you long for just a little plain-speaking, or, as in Calves, he strains a bit too hard for significance when his knack for vivid description would do the job on its own.
Mostly, though, he hits a balance that’s hugely impressive for a poet in his first collection (and one who has arrived relatively unheralded). It will be interesting to see where he goes next – he’s created a considerable weight of expectation for himself, but all the signs are that he has the talent to carry it.

Dampened enthusiasm?

Sometimes rain can be a blessing. I've been struggling to write as much as I'd like to over the last couple of months, for a whole number of reasons. I was on a day off yesterday, and after a bit of birding early on (nothing spectacular, but three distant Whinchats at Sence Valley FP were good), the rain set in and left me with no option but to sit in front of the laptop and get to work. And a good thing too.

I tinkered around with a couple of poems that I'd been making notes for over the past few weeks, I wrote a couple of reviews for this blog (I'll put them up in the next few days), I worked my way through a whole load of 'finished' poems that I've been pondering sending out for a while now, making revisions and alternate versions or just throwing them out if they don't come up to scratch, I started another major revision of a sequence of historical poems I've been working on over the last year, and I even started writing a little prose, as much for my own enjoyment as anything else, not having any ambitions in the field of fiction.

The test, of course, always comes the morning after, when you fire up the laptop again and come face to face with what seemed so marvellous the previous night. Well, having worked my way through it again just now, there is something there worth keeping, so I'm planning on using this little surge of energy while it lasts. There's more rain forecast...

At the Birdfair

Well, the rain held off for the most part, so we were spared any Glastonbury-style mudbaths, and another Birdfair passed off very pleasantly indeed.

Every year is different, every year’s the same. So, although there’s always something new to catch the eye, what really makes it so enjoyable is that you catch up with people who you don’t see from one year to the next. Where magazine contributors are concerned, for example, it’s always nice to be able to put faces to what are otherwise names at the bottom of an email, while there are always old friends to bump into. And there are birders of all sorts, from the hardcore twitcher right down to the armchair watcher.

Highlights included Sir David Attenborough, who seemed to be every bit as nice as he appears on the TV, closely followed by the wonderfully hospitable Prom Peru stand, who kept a constant stream of Pisco sours coming (it was wintry enough at times that you needed your cockles warming, so strictly medicinal, you see?).

I even met a fellow poet, Sandra MacGregor Hastie, whose company SMH Books publish the excellent Redbreast: The Robin in Life and Literature. Today, it's back to real work. Bah!

Birdfair

I'll be offline for most of the next few days, because it's that time of year again. I'm off to the shores of sunny (for now, at least) Rutland Water for Birdfair. If you're passing the Bird Watching stall in Marquee 2, pop over and say hello. I'll be back next week.

A riposte

Here's David Marsh's reply to that stream of nonsense from Giles Coren a couple of weeks back. I'm with him all the way. There seems to be a growing trend in all areas of the print media to see sub-editors as surplus to requirements - a false economy if ever there was one.

Chapbook review

I'll be posting my own review of James Wood's Inextinguishable as soon as I get the chance to write it, but in the meantime, there's this excellent piece at Fuselit. Enjoy.

Polyverse Poets

Here's the new Polyverse Poets page - as you'll see, it's a network for East Midlands based writers, and also contains links to the Polyverse Festival page (the event will take place in Loughborough in July next year). Have a browse...

Good on yer, Aussies!

I can't help finding this story just a bit heart-warming. I'm not a huge coffee-drinker, admittedly, being stereotypically British in my preference for a nice cup of industrial strength builders' tea, but when I used to work in the middle of Leicester and have to make very early starts, I was occasionally tempted. Starbucks, though, was always distinctly underwhelming, with the coffee seeming nothing special, and the price and welcome not a patch on the nice people at Cafe Roma (halfway down Halford Street, if you're ever there).

Poetry in motion

This is a slightly bizarre, yet rather charming idea. I'm still not entirely clear what the point being made is, but it sounds like fun all the same.