It's Shindig time again!

The latest Leamington Shindig, run by Nine Arches Press, takes place this Sunday, May 16th, at Wilde's Wine Bar, The Parade, Leamington Spa.

Reading will be Bob Mee and Lydia Towsey, there's music from punk-folk accordionist Matt Campbell, and of course there are open mic slots to sign up for on the night. The doors open at 6.30pm, with readings from 7.30pm.

Lydia Towsey is a poet and performer. Commissions include: Freedom Showcase in 2007 and Beyond Words in 2009. Lydia has performed with John Hegley, Jean Binta Breeze and Keorapetse Kgositsile, the South African Poet Laureate. Her latest publication is within The Great Grandchildren of Albion (a forthcoming project of Michael Horovitz). She comperes and coordinates WORD! the longest-running East Midlands poetry night (www.myspace.com/wordleicester) and in 2009 was the Artistic Director of The Lyric Lounge(www.lyriclounge.co.uk). She’s doing an MA in Writing and putting together her first collection. She drinks a lot of tea.

Bob Mee is Co-editor of Ragged Raven Press and as well as writting several collections of poetry, his latest being The Maker of Glass Eyes (2009), he has written several boxing books, including Bare Fists. This history of bare-knuckle prize-fighting in the 18th and 19th centuries was Sunday Times book of the week, and recommended by the New York Times and Playboy... which might make him the only poet around these parts to have been in Playboy. Or maybe not.

Entry is absolutely free - come along and enjoy the evening.

Bird update

Right, let's forget the election and football for a while. Outside, spring's supposed to be well and truly here, but the weather's doing its best to pretend otherwise. North-easterly winds and chilly nights mean it feels more like early March most of the time.

Where birds are concerned, that's made for an odd couple of months. Some spring passage migrants have been surprisingly easy to see (four Ring Ouzels in one field, an obligingly showy Redstart, grounded Whimbrels, etc), while some breeding summer visitors are still notable by their absence. Even now, I've only had a handful of House Martins and Swifts on my patch.

Hopefully that'll change when the winds turn around, maybe later this week. In the meantime, I caught up with three Greenshanks and a Wood Sandpiper at Wanlip Meadows last night - it'd be hard to find more elegant waders. In stark contrast, a dumpy little Dunlin was getting harassed by the breeding Little Ringed Plovers.

Come on you Mariners 2

Oh bugger...

Come on you Mariners!

I've steered clear of talking about football on here. Even two years ago, when my beloved Leicester City slipped into the third tier of English football for the first time ever, I resisted the temptation to blog about it. Football gets talked about quite enough elsewhere.

Grim as it was at the time, Leicester's slide down the divisions was never likely to be terminal. The chance to regroup and start afresh seemed to do them good, with a Division One title and now a place in the Championship play-offs the result. If, later this month, they come up with the big-money prize of a place in the Premier League, then 2008 will be well and truly forgotten.

But tomorrow, the first professional club I ever went to watch face a relegation that could have catastrophic effects. My dad's a lifelong Grimsby Town fan (he can remember them as a top-tier team, just after World War Two), being born and bred in nearby Louth, so the first football match I was ever taken to was Grimsby vs Peterborough, in 1976. The Mariners lost 3-1, but ever since they've held a place in my affections only a little lower than the Foxes.

In 1998, me and the old man twice made the trip down to Wembley (Grimsby's first-ever appearances there) to see them win the Football League Trophy and the Division Two play-off final. At other times, occasional spells in the second tier have been interspersed with desperate battles in the lower divisions. But through it all, they've never slipped out of the Football League.

This is a club that, in 1939, played an FA Cup semi-final against Wolves at Old Trafford that still holds the record for the biggest attendance at that ground. A club that helped make Bill Shankly's name as a manager, long before his eventual deification in Liverpool*. A club that has consistently produced quality football and footballers, out of all proportion to its size and the size of the town (and whatever Scunthorpe or Lincoln fans tell you, they've been the footballing standard-bearers for the huge county of Lincolnshire). Oh, and whatever the limitations of Blundell Park, it's a stone's throw from the best fish and chip shops in Britain, meaning a trip there's always a pleasure.

Tomorrow, that could change. They must win at Burton Albion, and hope Barnet lose to already-promoted Rochdale, if that proud 118-year record isn't to end. If it does, the financial consequences could sink the club forever.

So, no offence to Barnet, but I'm praying that they slip up against Rochdale, and the mighty Mariners rise to the occasion just along the road from here in Burton. If Grimsby do save themselves, at least they'll be in the right place to celebrate.

Come on you Mariners!!!!!!!!!!

* Shankly, in his autobiography, claimed that his 1951-52 Grimsby team was: "...pound for pound, and class for class, the best football team I have seen in England since the war. In the league they were in they played football nobody else could play. Everything was measured, planned and perfected and you could not wish to see more entertaining football."

Songs From Spider Street

Just a quick post to alert you to the launch of Songs From Spider Street, a collection of short stories by my old friend Mark Howard Jones.

It takes place at the Oriel Canfas Gallery in Canton, Cardiff, next Wednesday, May 12th, starting at 7.30pm. The Gallery, by the way, is at 44A Glamorgan Street, Canton, Cardiff CF5 1QS - you can get there from the car-park of The Insole pub, just off Cowbridge Road East, or Glamorgan Street runs parallel to Market Street.

Most importantly, Mark's work comes recommended by no less than one of my favourite writers ever, American sci-fi, fantasy and general literary legend Ray Bradbury, whose comment on the book is simply "Bravo!"

No higher accolade - not in my world, anyway.

Jilted City

I wrote the mini-review below for the latest Magma email newsletter. You can sign up for it here, to keep abreast of what's going on at one of the UK's very best poetry magazines, and to see the Subscriber's Poem Workshop.

Jilted City, Patrick McGuinness, Carcanet, £9.95

Throughout this, Patrick McGuinness's second full collection, there's an opposition between rootedness and displacement, and a further tension between careful reflection and obsessive over-analysis of situations and relationships.

The former no doubt owes something to the poet's highly cosmopolitan background - Tunisian-born, of Belgian and Newcastle-Irish parentage, he now lives in Wales. The multi-lingualism that goes with it is fully explored in poems such as French, where his mother-tongue (and "mother's tongue") is "freighted / with a kind of loss", and the enjoyable sequence Blue Guide takes stations on the Brussels-Luxembourg railway line as the starting points for journeys into the past.

There's a deeply personal strand to all this, too, with several poems touching on the death of his mother, lightly yet movingly.

A poem called The Empty Frame, meanwhile, serves pretty much as a summary of that second dichotomy, concerning itself with: "the squared-off angle, the spirit-levelled, bevelled edge that marks the end of / seeing, calls time on the eye, that marks the border between the over- and the / unexamined life."

Just once or twice, you might wonder whether McGuinness, fine and sharp observer of (especially urban) landscapes that he is, dwells on loss and decay a little excessively, but that, I think, is to miss his real object. By the end of the collection, his elegies for lost times and places move way beyond what we think of as nostalgia, and much closer to defining the original meaning of the word, as an actual 'maladie du pays' (or country sickness).

But, it's all done with a dry, ironic wit (Poem In White Ink, in this context, works as a far better joke than Don Paterson's similar blank page), so it's by no means a gruelling journey. In fact, you'll probably find yourself repeating it in pretty short order.

Tim Cumming: Radio Carbon 3

Tim Cumming: Radio Carbon 2

Tim Cumming: Radio Carbon 1

Tim Cumming: Danebury Ring

Film 2010: Tim Cumming

For the next few days, I'm going to be posting a series of film poems by Tim Cumming, who features in the new Bloodaxe anthology, Identity Parade.

This first one, Foreign News, and tomorrow's, Danebury Ring, are both included in that book, while the three-part Radio Carbon, to follow early next week, is a 30-minute film poem based on 24 unrhyming sonnets and the metaphor of radiocarbon as a broadcast medium, including parallel explorations of prehistoric, personal and present time.

I've just noticed this is my 600th post - nice way to break with tradition.

Magazines online

I just got an email informing me that Magma 36 is now online at the Poetry Library's digital magazine archive. It's a good issue, featuring the likes of Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Philip Gross, Bernard O'Donoghue, Claire Crowther, Peter Carpenter, Carrie Etter and many more - my own poem Hutt River Province is there too, down near the bottom.

My main reason for drawing attention to it, though, is just to flag up the archive more generally. If you've not seen it before, it's a great resource, with new mags and new issues being added all the time. Set aside plenty of time to browse it, though - there's an awful lot there.

Oh, and here's the advertising bit - that poem of mine appears in Troy Town, available direct from Arrowhead Press, or by emailing me at the link on the right (currently £7 inc p&p).

EDIT: Just noticed that April 21st is the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of the Principality of Hutt River (as it now is), inspiration for my poem. How appropriate!

Dr Fulminare's Questionable Arts

Website recommendation of the day/week/month/whatever - the wonderful Dr Fulminare's Questionable Arts, brainchild of Fuselit editors Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving.

Still not had time to read nearly enough of it, but the reviews are particularly good. My favourite so far? The bit in the review of Matt Nunn's wonderful Sounds In The Grass where Jon Stone says: "it's clear that Nunn is building his work not around themes or a voice or structural skeletons, but a thread of sound that he hungrily follows, rather like a desert mole hunting its prey by vibrations in the sand".

Why can't all reviews be like this?

Monday night live

Monday's Shindig at The Looking Glass in Leicester was another good night - attendance might have been slightly down on the first one, but the universities are still on holiday, I think, so that didn't help.

Simon Turner overcame a head-cold that threatened to turn his set into a Tunes advert ("a first-class return to Dottingham" - anyone remember that?) to give a taste of his second collection, Difficult Second Album, which should be out next week. It sounds as if it will venture into more political territory than his debut, although it retains the wonderful rhythms and great feel for urban pastoral that made that book such a pleasure.

Myra Connell's reading was terrific, too. Her John the Baptist poem (I haven't got From The Boat to hand just now, so can't check the actual title) really came to life, and made me re-read it several times when I got home. I've already talked at length about her chapbook, and hearing her read from it just reinforced the big impression it's already made.

Finally, Lydia Towsey needs no introduction in Leicester (and not just because of her wonderfully pink hair), and she was as good as always. I especially like her African poem - it swoops from funny to serious and back again more than once. It was particularly nice that she was able to read a poem actually written in The Looking Glass, too.

In between times, there were some excellent open mic readers, too. Good to catch up with Malc Dewhirst, the man behind the Polesworth Poets Trail, who read well.

Plans are already in hand for the next Shindig, on June 14th - it's looking like a great line-up of George Ttoouli, Jacqui Rowe and Deborah Tyler-Bennett.

From The Boat

Myra Connell, Nine Arches Press, 2010, £5

Some poets have the knack of saying more and more the less they write, and Myra Connell seems to be one of those. Throughout this chapbook (at 40 pages, it's actually not that much shorter than many full collections), she hones poems right down to the quick - the more pared-down they got, the more I enjoyed them.

In part that's because Connell trusts the reader to do part of the work. You're constantly left with the feeling that you've come in halfway through a story or conversation, and the pleasure is in filling in some of the gaps yourself.

So, in opening poem And yes, the house, you're left wondering just who the stranger is, what the significance of the reported comment "the hope is stupid" might be. Moments like that crop up again and again, and they have the effect of giving a dream-like quality to the work, as if both you and the poet are slipping in and out of sleep.

I wouldn't want it to sound, though, as if the poet is taking the easy option of leading the reader out into the trackless wastes and then abandoning them. There are threads to follow, of mourning and of quiet persistence in the face of difficult and often baffling circumstances, and while Connell isn't afraid to be angry (really angry, too, not a mood I encounter that often in contemporary poetry), there's a tenderness there too.

And, importantly, there's a real gift for writing poetry that enacts our day-to-day thought processes in rhythms that genuinely delight. The whole of From The Valley, for example, with its closing:

Carp moved goldly,

muscled. Go today. See carp.

Go anywhere with walls, deep pools,

and gold (but don't say gold)

leaves floating

cold.

Old Map was another favourite, returning again to that theme of carrying on even when the way ahead is far from clear:

You (who do not give up)

must find a way across the stream:

steep up and climb the fence and there

- is still no path.

This is a fine collection that I'd like to think will find a wide readership - writing about uncertainty and dislocation with such assurance is a hard trick to pull off, but Myra Connell does it wonderfully well here.

Shindig!

One more reminder that the Nine Arches Press Shindig is on Monday (April 12th), with readings from 7.30pm, at the Looking Glass, 68-70 Braunstone Gate, Leicester LE3 5LG.

The featured readers are Myra Connell, Lydia Towsey and Simon Turner.

Lydia Towsey is a poet and performer. Commissions include: Freedom Showcase in 2007 and Beyond Words in 2009. Residencies include two weeks with Theatre Royal Stratford East and years inside Leicester’s coffee shops... Lydia has performed with John Hegley, Jean Binta Breeze and Keorapetse Kgositsile, the South African Poet Laureate. Her latest publication is within The Great Grandchildren of Albion (a forthcoming project of Michael Horovitz). She comperes and coordinates WORD! the longest-running East Mids poetry night (www.myspace.com/wordleicester) and in 2009 was the Artistic Director of The Lyric Lounge (www.lyriclounge.co.uk). She’s doing an MA in Writing and putting together her first collection. She drinks a lot of tea.

Simon Turner was born in Birmingham in 1980. Heaventree Press published his first collection, You Are Here, in 2007. His poems and reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including Tears in the Fence, The Wolf, Horizon Review and The London Magazine. With George Ttoouli, he co-edits Gists and Piths, an experiment in blogging dedicated to the publication and discussion of contemporary poetry, which has been up and running since 2007. He lives and works in Warwickshire.

Myra Connell’s first collection of poems, A Still Dark Kind of Work, was published by Heaventree Press in 2008. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, and her short stories in two collections from Tindal Street Press, Her Majesty and Are You She? Her new collection, From The Boat, is just out from Nine Arches. She lives in Birmingham and has two grown-up sons.

Entry is absolutely free, and you can sign up on the door for the open mic.

PS. Simon's new collection is called Difficult Second Album. I've been trying to come up with a list of 20 great difficult and/or great second albums, along with little write-ups to justify the claim - any suggestions? There might even be a free book or pamphlet or two in it for the best I receive...

Party fears one

I once read a piece by Hugo Williams saying that, when putting together a poetry collection, he liked to print off each individual poem on a separate sheet, then lay them out on the floor. Then, he added, just like at a party, certain poems would start to gravitate towards others.

It's good advice, although actually pretty hard to achieve in my cluttered house (even a chapbook would be a struggle, if I'm honest - floorspace gets swallowed up at an astonishing rate). But it's worked for me in the past, so I'm doing it again.

Certain poems have started to resolve themselves into little knots, but others are remaining resolutely around the edges. My next task is to decide which of those wallflowers to show the door, and which to entice into the fun and games going on elsewhere. Maybe breaking out the cheese footballs and cava (on special offer down the Co-op just now) will help them shake of their inhibitions...

Martin Figura - Whistle

Over at the excellent Peony Moon, Michelle McGrane has blogged about Martin Figura's debut collection, Whistle, out now from Arrowhead. I'm looking forward to seeing a copy - all being well I'll be able to make it to the launch in Norwich next month (Martin's wife Helen Ivory has her new Bloodaxe collection The Breakfast Machine launched at the same event).

You can read more about the book, about Martin, and even sample a few poems, over at Peony Moon now.

Electric Polyolbion

Thanks to Matthew Stewart for pointing me to this feature from Saturday's Guardian - get down to near the bottom and Paul Farley talks about his new project, The Electric Polyolbion. It's always nice to see poor old Michael Drayton getting a bit of limelight (albeit about 400 years too late), so I'll be following this with interest.

I first came across Drayton years ago when reading about hill figures (of the Uffington White Horse type). I think, from what I remember, that in the Warwickshire section of Poly-olbion, he waxed lyrical about the now-vanished Red Horse of Tysoe, identifying himself with it, and Shakespeare with the better-known Uffington figure. I should really read it all sometime soon.

National Poetry Competition

Poet and novelist Helen Dunmore has won the £5,000 first prize in the National Poetry Competition with The Malarkey, having entered at the last minute "on an impulse".

You sometimes hear the view that poets who have "made it" shouldn't be entering competitions like this, that they should be reserved for bringing new poets to wider attention. I don't have a problem with it at all - I'd imagine very few poets or novelists in the UK have "made it" to the extent that they can afford to ignore the possibility of a £5,000 prize. And anyway, surely all entrants want to compete against the best.

That said, I was a bit dismayed by the comment from Ruth Padel that when they discovered who it was by, they "threw their hats in the air". It makes it sound as if they wouldn't have been just as pleased if it had been by a complete unknown (I'm sure that's not what she meant, but it doesn't sound good).

But anyway, I like the look of what I've read of the shortlisted poems so far, especially those by Jon Stone, Ian Pindar and Sam Riviere. It looks like a really strong, energetic list to me. The winner itself is growing on me too, although I think it does err on the side of being a bit too prosey in parts.

Shindig! in Leicester

It's that time again - the next Nine Arches Press Shindig is on Monday, April 12th, with readings from 7.30pm, at the Looking Glass, 68-70 Braunstone Gate, Leicester LE3 5LG.

The featured readers this time around are Myra Connell, Lydia Towsey and Simon Turner. It's another varied and very entertaining bill, I think - we're lucky to have three such talented poets in town together.

Lydia Towsey is a poet and performer. Commissions include: Freedom Showcase in 2007 and Beyond Words in 2009. Residencies include two weeks with Theatre Royal Stratford East and years inside Leicester’s coffee shops... Lydia has performed with John Hegley, Jean Binta Breeze and Keorapetse Kgositsile, the South African Poet Laureate. Her latest publication is within The Great Grandchildren of Albion (a forthcoming project of Michael Horovitz). She comperes and coordinates WORD! the longest-running East Mids poetry night (www.myspace.com/wordleicester) and in 2009 was the Artistic Director of The Lyric Lounge (www.lyriclounge.co.uk). She’s doing an MA in Writing and putting together her first collection. She drinks a lot of tea.

Simon Turner was born in Birmingham in 1980. Heaventree Press published his first collection, You Are Here, in 2007. His poems and reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including Tears in the Fence, The Wolf, Horizon Review and The London Magazine. With George Ttoouli, he co-edits Gists and Piths, an experiment in blogging dedicated to the publication and discussion of contemporary poetry, which has been up and running since 2007. He lives and works in Warwickshire.

Myra Connell’s first collection of poems, A Still Dark Kind of Work, was published by Heaventree Press in 2008. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, and her short stories in two collections from Tindal Street Press, Her Majesty and Are You She? Her new collection, From The Boat, is just out from Nine Arches. She lives in Birmingham and has two grown-up sons.

Entry is absolutely free, and you can sign up on the door for the open mic.

I should add, by the way, that Simon's new Nine Arches collection, Difficult Second Album, might even be out by the time of the reading. I loved his first book, but at the reading in Leamington the other week, he warned not to expect a re-tread, saying that there was a 'Zen Arcade' feel to the new book. Now, anything that in any way recalls Husker Du's classic double-album is OK by me, so I'm more eager than ever to see the collection.

'Ard wok? Yeah, but worth mekkin' the effort, me duck

Still on a historical theme, I read this at the weekend.

I'm always wary of Hollywood versions of Robin Hood (well, I'm wary of pretty much any adaptation, be it TV or film or whatever), but I really can't wait to see this film now. Honestly. It'll be good to hear an attempt at an East Midlands accent. In the past, on the rare occasions that a TV programme has been set in the region, everybody's spoken like Brummies (Steve Coogan's Saxondale is the honourable exception). The prospect of England's greatest folk hero greeting his outlaw band with a gruff "ay up, me ducks" is too good to miss.*

I am sightly baffled by some of the pronunciations they mention. 'Corp' for 'cup'? No, and 'Noddinham' doesn't sound right, either. More like 'Nottnum', I'd have said. Still, 'tekking' is dead right, and hopefully they'll remember to drop their aitches and shorten all their vowels to ridiculous extremes. 'Wok' for work.** 'Oss' for horse, etc. And of course, they'll have to refer to their ill-gotten victuals as their 'snap'. Kudos to Crowe for even trying, though. I'll be first in the queue to see it.

* The comments thread, predictably, gets into the old Nottinghamshire vs Yorkshire debate. But we all know he was really from Leicestershire, don't we?

** Essential in terrible joke usually only intelligible to people from Whitwick (Johnny Wong's is the Chinese takeaway in the Market Place)...
"Have you heard? They're laying people off at Johnny Wong's."
"Really?"
"Yeah, they've got no wok."

Hoard saved for nation

Glad to see that the Staffordshire Hoard will be staying in the West Midlands after the £3.3 million purchase price was met with the help of a grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Exactly where it'll be is another matter. There'll probably be a lobby for it to be in Staffordshire itself, but I'd have thought that the logical place, in terms of security and ensuring it's accessible to as many people as possible, is Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Still slightly disappointed that it was Dr David Starkey who was being interviewed about it on every TV and radio news report I heard last night. I'm sure he's very good when it comes to his own specialist area, but couldn't they have found an Anglo-Saxonist?

Suit Of Lights - Damian Walford Davies

Seren Books, 2009

Sometimes, writing a review, you struggle to find a way into it, a place to start. Not so here - by the end of the first line of the first poem, Bee, Walford Davies has given you a major talking point, one that you find yourself returning to again and again in the course of an always entertaining and thought-provoking book.

Let's have a look at the first two lines:

Bumble or honey? I couldn't tell, not be-

ing an apiarist...

See what I'm talking about? Walford Davies breaks the line halfway through 'being', turning what might otherwise be a mundane sentence into a pun. It's a device he repeats at regular intervals throughout this collection, and I still can't make up my mind how effective it is.

On the plus side, I have to admire a poet with the panache and sheer guts to do that on the first line of the first poem of his first full collection. And initially, it works. There's the pun already mentioned, and later in the same poem he breaks the word 'weight' between lines. Almost impossible to read, you might think, but in fact it works well in the context of working with something fragile, tiny, "a fraction of an ounce".

There are times though, later in the book, when it starts to feel like something of a tic, an attention-seeking gimmick, even. At best it can seem pointless ("depart-/ment", in Plague, for example), at worst irritatingly distracting. It's not necessarily going to be a deal-breaker, a Marmite factor (it wasn't for me - as I say, I'm still undecided about it, but I liked the book a lot), but you will find yourself thinking hard about it. And that, to be fair, might be reason enough for Walford Davies to use it.

For the most part, he's a broadly mainstream poet, usually at his best when dealing with subjects drawn from history, landscape or art (some of the more domestic pieces felt a little underwhelming, or at least less essential). Two things, I think, really set him apart from the pack, though.

One is the way that, despite most of his poems being on the short side (and even the longer ones tend to use short lines, always giving them an airy, light feel), his language is satisfyingly rich, dense with allusions and, yes, more puns. It goes without saying that a poet ought to relish the sound, the shape, the weight of words, but it's not always as obvious that they do as it is here. The result is extremely readable - while Walford Davies is coming from an academic background, and is never shy of using his enviably wide knowledge, this is poetry that's anything but difficult. On the contrary, it's the sort of book you might find yourself reading in one sitting, alternating between chuckling and furrowing your brow.

Secondly, there's the fact that Walford Davies seems to be a very patient poet, one who's willing to take time to build up a cumulative effect. That's especially evident in the many sequences - Kilvert, The Ideal City, Salt Islands and Aerial were all particular favourites - and in recurring images, such as the "suit of lights" of the title, linking disparate scenes and characters.

So forget my initial reservations about the line-breaks. Walford Davies deserves kudos for trying something different. He deserves even more for a collection that's as rich and well-achieved as any I've come across in a while.

New poem

A new-ish poem of mine, The Limits, is up at Ink, Sweat & Tears. There's loads of good poetry and prose on the site, so have a good browse...