Catching up

Thursday night saw the launch of Birdbook 1 at the Phoenix Artists' Club, in London. It was great to be able to be there (and reminded me that I really ought to get down to more London events), and to catch up with the likes of Jo Bell, Simon Barraclough, Roddy Lumsden, Derek Adams, and, of course, Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving, the poetry dynamos behind Sidekick Books.

I really enjoyed the readings, especially as the accompanying art was projected behind the stage. There's so much good stuff in the book that it's hard to pick out favourites, but some of the poems that kept coming back to me later included Great Tit, by Emily Hasler, Green Woodpecker, by James Wilkes, and Edward Mackay's Tacc Tacc, Blackcap. Also, several of the poems that took more oblique approaches to the birds - Chrissy Williams' Redstart, Simon Barraclough's Pied Flycatcher, and Roddy Lumsden's Daredevil (which manages to connect Scottish Crossbills and Evel Knievel). Anyway, there's a lot of high-quality poetry and art in there, so buy a copy.

In other poetry news, I was delighted to see that Kona Macphee won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize with her collection Perfect Blue. I've mentioned before that it was one of my favourite collections of last year.

Finally, there's a lovely review of hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica by Julia Bird in issue 50 of Magma, along with David Morley on Romani poetry, some Magma memories from previous contributors, and poetry from the likes of Tim Turnbull, Helen Ivory, Penelope Shuttle, AB Jackson and Michelle McGrane. 

The unforgiven

I've just bought the DVD of the excellent Fire In Babylon, a documentary film looking at the all-conquering West Indies team of the late 70s and 80s. It's a wonderful reminder of just how good they were - for all their lack of spin bowling, and very occasional fragility against good spinners (well, one great spinner, Abdul Qadir) themselves - I'd still back them to have beaten the more recent great Aussie team, or the Pakistan team of the early 90s spearheaded by Wasim and Waqar.

As a cricket fan at the time, of course, it wasn't always comfortable viewing, with England suffering some catastrophic hammerings at the hands of Lloyd, Richards, Greenidge, Haynes, Holding, Marshall, Garner and co. But, perhaps because so many of them played for long periods in county cricket too, they occupy a special place in my cricketing affections. The fact that they played such an exciting, attacking brand of cricket helped, too.

I can remember my dad taking me to see a Sunday League game at Leicester in the early 80s, against Somerset. From what I remember, Leicestershire won, with their own West Indian, the great Andy Roberts, leading the way. But the real thrill was afterwards, seeing Viv Richards and Joel Garner at close quarters. Both, I remember, seemed huge. Richards had the build of a heavyweight boxer, so you could see why bowlers tended to get intimidated by him even before they started their run-up, while Garner was just impossibly tall. Softly-spoken and charming, he quickly persuaded all us autograph-hunting ankle-biters to line up quietly while he signed everyone's book or programme.

Cricket's not yet undergone the separation between players and fans that has affected football, but it still seems slightly unreal having seen such sporting gods in the flesh. Richards remains the greatest batsman I've ever seen or expect to see. Malcolm Marshall, who died of cancer tragically young, was the greatest quick bowler, but Garner would be somewhere up there too.

But if Fire In Babylon is a celebration of the Caribbean's golden age of cricket, this excellent article on CricInfo highlights a forgotten side of West Indian cricket in the 80s. When you hear black South Africans (including Nelson Mandela) speak about how vital the sporting boycott was to changing attitudes, it's hard if not impossible to argue, but it's equally difficult not to feel an awful lot of sympathy for those West Indians whose lives were wrecked by their misjudged decision to try to earn a living.

Birdbook launch

I'm off to the launch of Birdbook 1 in London tomorrow night - if you're anywhere near the Phoenix Arts Club on Charing Cross Road at around 7.30pm, it'll be well worth a couple of hours of your time, with a large and varied line-up of poets reading from Sidekick Books' splendid publication.

Shod takes top award!

I was delighted to see on Twitter last night that Mark Goodwin's Shod, published by Nine Arches Press, has won the East Midlands Book Award.

The worthy winner was announced by Ian McMillan, one of the judges, at the Lowdham Book Festival, with Shod chosen from this strong shortlist.

The book's very different from what you might expect from Mark if you've only read his (also excellent) Shearsman collections - I haven't seen any comments from the judges yet, but it's a book that rather transcends genres, a real one-of-a-kind.

Now it's even easier...

...to buy Nine Arches Press books. The new online shop is up and running, meaning you can directly order copies of Under The Radar magazine, short stories by Joel Lane, or poetry from the likes of David Hart, David Morley, Roz Goddard, Luke Kennard, Myra Connell, Claire Crowther, Ruth Larbey, Simon Turner, Mark Goodwin, Peter Carpenter and myself.

You don't need a PayPal account (no bad thing, given the problems I've had getting my account to work lately), and postage is just £1 per item.

There are also seperate pages for each publication now (here's the one for my collection, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica), and a sneak-preview of some of Nine Arches' forthcoming publications.

An interview with David Briggs

One of my favourite poetry collections of 2010 was David Briggs’ debut The Method Men, from Salt. I was lucky enough to review it for Magma 48, in which I ended by saying that it was a book that gave the impression of the arrival of a poet almost fully formed.

Re-reading it recently has only confirmed those early impressions for me, so it was a pleasure to be able to interview David about the book, and to post a couple of poems from the collection, as part of his Method and Madness virtual tour.

MM: One of the things I enjoyed most about The Method Men was the use of folklore (and maybe invented folklore) to set up a way of looking at the world more generally. Has this been a long-term concern in your poetry?

David Briggs: Yes, I think it’s been there throughout. My English degree included a large dose of Old and Middle English lit., and I’d been a folksy singer-songwriter before I turned to writing poetry, so there are some influences from those two strands.

As I see it, folklore provides narratives and methods for dealing with the world that are typically oppositional to the dominant institutional narratives of how we should live, or of what events in our lives mean. Often, they’re entirely irrational – superstitions, divinatory practices, etc. – yet, they’re also strangely potent, especially in providing signs and symbols, and have served cultures (for good and ill) across the world for aeons. If I can explain my terrible day in terms of having seen one magpie on the way to work that morning, rather than in terms of complex institutional and economic forces I’m powerless to change, I may be throwing in my lot with the chaotic forces of chance (and irrationality), but I might see two magpies tomorrow morning, and that might put a spring in my step that causes me to have what I regard as a much better day. That may be a silly example, but I’m convinced a similar (if more complex form) of folkloric irrationality is at work in us all the time, to varying extents, even in a scientific age. Folklore has a much longer half-life than radioactive material: it lingers on in the culture. It seems to work in a similar way to language, in that coinages and new-minted slang eventually find their way into the dictionary.

This is a furrow Ian Duhig’s been ploughing for some years; but, yes, it’s something that informs how I write. The psychology of why we go to folklore (in the broadest sense of that word) and what we take from it is something that lies behind the title poem to the collection. In that poem I try to suggest that there’s something almost as arbitrary, as chaotic, as the significance I ascribe to a lover’s first words in the morning (words being merely another type of sign), as there is in the divinatory significance ascribed by Carson et al to a westward flutter of swifts, or a swung pendulum. And it’s certainly present in poems like HistoriaOccultica, Twenty Below Zero and Woodland, with Two Figures. Some of these pieces seem to happen in an indeterminate historical setting, and that’s reflective of the process I’ve tried to articulate here remaining the same, regardless of time or place. Even poems like Snow touch on this, because the particular meme of ‘Eskimo words for snow’, despite being erroneous (as Stephen Pinker points out), has taken on a life of its own, become folkloric, and that sort of thing provides a lot of room for play and invention. In the case of The Ghosts of Highgate Cemetery, there seemed to be something of a psycho-geographical conjunction between the proximity of the Fleet running as an underground river near a cemetery for public figures, and then on down towards Fleet Street, with all of its former journalistic associations, that was too good to resist.

MM: I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about the music, then. Was it a case of songwriting slowly becoming poetry, or did the two strands gradually draw together?

DB: I think it was more of a case of realising my limitations as a musician, coming to the hard place of realising I didn't have the skill to write the kind of songs I wanted to write. I'd found writing words the easier part of the equation anyway, and when what I wanted to do with words felt restricted by the range of forms and styles I possessed musically, the musical accompaniment began to recede. 

But I do see my work falling broadly within the lyric tradition, so rhythm, metre, sound and euphony has always been an important element in what I'm trying to do. The long poem Bloomsday, towards the back of the collection, has (to my ear at least) a strong rhythmic pulse, and that was very much a part of its composition. Derek Walcott has spoken about finding the rhythm of a poem in the first line-and-a-half, and then riding that cadence, like a wave, to the end of the poem's composition. That's definitely my experience of writing Bloomsday. You've mentioned the Anglo-Saxon influence on the metre of Seafaring in your review of the book, and I think there's a similar song-sound in poems like Winter Music. So, I think once I hung up the old guitar, any musicality I did possess found its way into the poetry.

With songs, as with poetry, there's the piece you want to write, the one in the far corner of your consciousness, of which you only get the briefest, most tantalising, glimpse. Even though you can't get your hands on it, you sense enough of it to get excited. But then there's the piece that actually comes out when you sit down to write. Often, it's a disappointment. It doesn't have that feral smell and energy of the imagined piece. I think I found I got closer to those Platonic pieces when I tried to write poems than when I tried to write songs. In the end, you go with what works.

MM: One of the things that struck me very forcefully about your collection was how coherent it feels, especially compared to most debuts. While both the folkloric themes and the musical element must have helped with that, could you tell us a little bit about the process of putting the book together?

DB: I was fortunate to get some very good advice from people like Roddy Lumsden and Matthew Caley. I have a tendency to think that any poem I've managed to place in a good magazine or competition must, by virtue of that placing, be a good poem, one that ought to go in the collection. But Roddy and Matthew counselled me to work on the sequencing and the structure of the book as a whole, and that sometimes involved excluding previously published poems, and waiting till the book as a whole came into focus. For example, of my 21 Gregory submission poems, only a handful made the final cut.

The title poem hinges on the idea that all those characters, Carson et al., have become reliant on a set of idiosyncratic, sometimes irrational, mental tics and habits. Once I realised that nearly all the characters in the poems I was writing at that time shared a similar condition, and that some of them had been forced by circumstance to recognise that their methods needed to be jettisoned for a new way of thinking, that it was time for a paradigm shift, I had a thread with which to stitch the poems together.

After that, the poems grouped themselves together fairly easily. Some folkloric pieces, including the title poem, set out some of the themes and ways of thinking, early on. They provide a lens through which to read the pieces that follow. Then you get little runs of two and three that hopefully speak to each other: a rain poem followed by a drought poem; a run of graveyard poems that end with one set in the underworld; a poem about clearing the attic in my mother's house sets up a short series of pieces about childhood memory; a self-portrait introduces the album sonnets; then, a run of wintery folkloric poems; finally, the book ends with a poem that sees a method man finally learning to abandon his method, to inhabit a moment. In that way, there's a sort of partial narrative arc running through the book.

So, while it was sometimes hard to throw out poems of which I'd become fond, and to persevere with others until the book did hang together, I'm glad I did. One of the most agreeable things about the reviews was that readers like you, Julia Bird, Steve Spence and others, noticed and approved the structural patterning. I don't think the greatest hits, or rattlebag, approach is wrong (a lot of people read poetry that way, want something they can dip into); but, I think you can add texture if poems are sequenced so as to echo each other, argue with each other, or pick up where another left off.

The Ghosts of Highgate Cemetery

in frowsy, mutton-sleeved grave-clothes,
clockless, cold and sepia
in the bucolic lanes between tombs,

come visiting two-and-two,
bearing guineas and barley cakes,
and they draw together as curtains

at graves of the newly interred.
There are courteous introductions;
calling cards are left to lean hopefully

at the more baroque mausoleums.
You think you might settle into this,
as a toast is raised to cool draughts

from the Fleet, lesser-known river
of the Underworld, whose waters confer
anonymity, distinction or infamy

according to inscrutable principles.


Snow

Contrary to popular belief, the Inuit do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English...Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen.
- STEPHEN PINKER, The Language Instinct


Say there are no words for lawyer
in the Inuit tongue; yet, perhaps, 
a dozen by which to adjudicate


snowfall. Say there is no English word
for the particular spectacle
of aurora-lit snowfall,


while for lawyer we have: barrister,
attorney, brief, solicitor, silk,
advocate, justice, litigator,


magistrate, counsel, prosecutor,
perhaps even jurisprudentia.
And it follows that in the land


where they speak only statistics
there will be a sworn affadavit
against each irregular snowflake.


But you are advised not to impugn 
the government of such climes
for burying truth beneath an icy


deluge of little, whitely-lying words.
Some thoughts will simply fail to settle
in our language, or gather only


in obscure, mountainous regions.
This thought itself may fail to find
the climate necessary to its


survival and, so, melt gently
on the thick muscle of my tongue
as might tla (snow), tlaslo (slow falling snow),


or penstla (merely the idea of snow).



To buy The Method Men, or for further information, click here.

Stealing Fire

There's a good tradition of poets leading second lives as novelists, and in particular as writers of what gets called 'genre fiction' (too often that term is used rather dismissively).

David Harsent and Jane Holland are two current names that immediately spring to mind, and they're now joined by Craig Sterling, better known as Edinburgh poet James Wood.

His debut novel, Stealing Fire, will be published by Leamington Books on 23rd June, and is being distributed at airports by WH Smith/BAA plc, by Blackwell Books and other high street retailers, plus, of course, online from the likes of Amazon.

You can find a website on the book here, a YouTube video on it here, and there's even four bottles of champagne on offer for the best review of Stealing Fire under 250 words submitted before 31st August 2011.

If you're actually in Edinburgh on the 23rd, Leamington Books will be giving away 50 copies at Edinburgh Airport between 8am and 10am, and the launch party will be at Blackwell Books (Edinburgh) at 6.30pm.

Now, Craig/James has said that his sole intention was to create a novel that was fun to write, and hopefully fun to read, too. And it is. I was lucky enough to see an advance copy, and it's the sort of rattling, rollicking read that you're very grateful for on a long train or plane journey. I used to be a big reader of thrillers, although I'd have to admit that I'm more familiar with Jack Higgins/Freddie Forsyth era stuff than the new giants of the genre, and Stealing Fire is a book that does exactly what you'd want it to do. It's pacy, exciting, funny in places, and above all, it grabs your attention and refuses to let go. Get hold of a copy and see what I mean...

Buzzwords Open Poetry Competition 2011

Buzzwords, in Cheltenham, is one of the longest-running reading series in British poetry. Having read there back in February with Luke Kennard, I can vouch for what an excellent audience it attracts - attentive, appreciative, and keen to buy books. It all makes for an entertaining and rewarding evening.

It also makes a point of paying all readers, and its annual poetry competition helps fund that. As you can see here, this year's competition is being judged by Alison Brackenbury, and carries a £600 first prize. Other prizes include one for entries from Gloucestershire. You've got until July to enter, and can pay by cheque or PayPal, so why not have a look at what's required?

Constructed Landscapes

Last Thursday, I took part in a workshop led by Mark Goodwin at the Phoenix in Leicester, which took the work of artist Helen Saunders as its starting point.

It was a great couple of hours, very inspiring, and I'm going to go back for another look at Helen's work, as the exhibition has been extended until a week on Friday (June 10th). Quite the best thing, I think, was that Helen herself took part, and talked quite a bit about her processes and techniques.

I'm going to come back to that, and its relevance to poetry (incidentally, I might be wrong, but I think Helen's responsible for the cover of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' Edgelands), in more depth a bit later, but in the meantime, I can recommend the exhibition very highly.

Kaleidoscope

Yesterday's Nine Arches Press reading at Warwick University, as part of the Kaleidoscope conference, was just that bit different to any reading I've done before.

After Jane Commane had talked about how the press uses colour in the design of its books and chapbooks, Roz Goddard, Matt Nunn, Maria Taylor and myself took turns to talk a little about how colour figures in our work, and why we used particular favourite colours, before reading poems that, hopefully, illustrated what we'd mentioned.

To be honest, I really enjoyed the preparation for the event. It's very strange going back through your own work in detail, and I found myself noticing a couple of themes, and more than a couple of stylistic tics, that I hadn't really noticed before. When I get a bit more time, I'll post some of my notes on here, maybe.

There was a small but very responsive audience, and it all closed with a discussion of what we'd just read that I only wish could have gone on longer. Lots of food for thought.

My set was:

Crash
Glass
Halcyon
Yellowhammers
Poem
Kilter
Azul

People of Europe, rise up

Good post here by Alan Baker about the protests going on in Spain. I've heard various reports online, and through friends living in Spain, but it's been nearly impossible to find anything in the mainstream media in the UK.

A Nine Arches reading with a difference

On Sunday, I'll be reading along with Matt Nunn, Roz Goddard and Maria Taylor at a conference at the University of Warwick, entitled Kaleidoscope: new perspectives on the humanities. Our Nine Arches Press Showcase takes place at 1.30pm, in Milburn House. More details are here.

StAnza afterword

There are photos, podcasts, videos, interviews and reviews from StAnza 2011 here - enjoy!

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.

Drafting poetry

David Morley flagged this up earlier on Twitter, and it's absolutely fascinating. It's Jacob Polley's poem The Reader, draft by draft, or at least in umpteen alternative versions.

At StAnza recently, one of the highlights for me was Paul Farley's workshop in which he took us back through the drafts of his poem Treacle. I thought it was really a pretty brave thing to do - I think I'd die of shame if some of the drafts of most of my poems ever saw the light of day. It was actually quite reassuring to see that the simple hard graft of writing and revising again and again could be so effective, but also slightly terrifying in the way it highlighted that changing just one or two words could tip a poem in a completely new direction.

Essential viewing

So, tomorrow night at nine, our TV screens will once again be given over to the stories of a group of ruthless, back-stabbing, self-interested individuals and their endless machinations and romantic complications.

Of course, if you don't want to watch The Viking Sagas, on BBC4, which will look at the great outpouring of historically-based literature from 13th Century Iceland (it focuses on Laxdaela Saga, although my own favourite is Njal's Saga), you could go for something completely different and switch to BBC1 for The Apprentice. Which would, to be fair, be improved further by the contestants settling their differences with axes.

Two election questions

I have a couple of questions that I'd genuinely like to hear some answers to. One's for any Lib Dems out there, the other for returning officers.

1 The Lib Dems have repeatedly said that a coalition with the Tories was the only real option open to them, other than trying to force a second election last year. Now I can understand that they didn't want to prop up a beaten Labour Party, but what was stopping them agreeing to support a minority Tory government on a bill-by-bill basis? It would have allowed them to temper the worst excesses of Cameron and Osborne, while remaining true to the principles still held by the majority of the Lib Dem rank and file. It might even have proved popular with the electorate, given that it would have involved actual debate and compromise, rather than Lib Dem MPs being used to steamroller ideologically-driven policies through Parliament.

OK, so the Tories might not have wanted it, but had they then forced a second election, the country could have drawn its own conclusions. As it stands, in return for an AV referendum they were never going to win (partly because even many supporters of electoral reform, myself included, can't see that AV is much of an improvement on FPTP) and a few cabinet posts for Clegg and his cronies, the Lib Dems are committed to supporting policies they never advocated. Individual MPs can still rebel, but it's much harder to do so inside a formal coalition. All I've heard from Lib Dem frontbenchers on this is that the country didn't need uncertainty. Oh yes, because the current arrangement is so stable, isn't it?

To argue, as Clegg and others have done, that their manifesto was for a Liberal government, not a ConDem one, and that they're not therefore breaking any promises, is a barefaced lie. They knew when they drew up the manifesto that the only situation in which they'd be able to implement any of its policies would be as part of a coalition, formal or otherwise. If any of them genuinely believed there was any likelihood of a majority Liberal government, then they're too deluded to be allowed anywhere near  any sort of power.

2 At every election - general, local, European, whatever - since I moved to my current home in 2000, I've been approached on the way into the polling station by canvassers from one or other party (the three main ones, plus the BNP), asking to see my polling card. On every occasion, I've asked who they are, and what business it is of theirs, and have been told "Oh, we're allowed to" (note that they don't answer the first of my questions).

Well, no, I don't think you are. I was under the impression that the law guarantees a secret ballot, so surely that means that whether or not you vote (until it becoms compulsory, which I'd have no problem with), as well as how you vote, should remain secret? A colleague has pointed out that it also creates the impression that you have to have a polling card to vote. You don't. It speeds things up, but you don't need it.

If they're so convinced they're allowed to do this, why do they do it in such a shifty fashion, without first identifying themselves (there have been one or two honourable exceptions)? In almost every case, it's done by someone wearing no party rosettes or similar, and in a manner that suggests they're election officials.

So, perhaps someone with experience of election administration could explain why canvassers are allowed to continue doing this? In the meantime, I'll continue telling them to mind their own business.

Catapult To Mars

This rather splendid blog, Catapult To Mars, was flagged up to me the other day. It boasts poetry from the likes of CJ Allen, which is never a bad thing, but I'm also intrigued by anywhere that's willing to publish poetry in English, Scots or Spanish. As I'm attempting to learn the latter, I can tell myself that time spent browsing the blog's archives isn't just enjoyable, or artistically satisfying, it's educational too. Bonus!

Birdbook 1: Towns, Parks, Gardens and Woodland

A satisfyingly solid package thudded onto the doormat the other day, my copy of the long-awaited Birdbook 1, from Sidekick Books.

It's an anthology of bird poetry from contemporary writers, along with artwork for each species, and it contains work from (deep breath...) Rachael Allen, Rowyda Amin, Hannah Bagshaw, Becky Barnicoat, Simon Barraclough, Julia Bird, Niall Campbell, Michael Chance, Tom Chivers, Hanna Terese Christiansson, Monika Cilmi, John Clegg, Dave Coates, Phil Cooper, Lois Cordelia, Lorna Crabbe, Caroline Crew, Nia Davies, Lizzy Dening, Isobel Dixon, Philip Elbourne, Dai George, Matthew Gregory, Cliff Hammett, Aiko Harman, Emily Hasler, Holly Hopkins, Nicholas Hughes, i-lib, Kirsten Irving, Andrew Jamison, Amy Key, Judith Lal, Alexandra Lazar, Natalie Lazarus, Katherine Leedale, Roddy Lumsden, Edward Mackay, Marion McCready, Siofra McSherry, Kate Parkinson, Saroj Patel, Kate Potts, Richard Price, Fiona Purves, Declan Ryan, Bethany Settle, Jon Stone, Jennie Webber, James Wilkes, Chrissy Williams and myself.

That's a lot of birds, a lot of poetry, a lot of art, and a lot of kudos due to Sidekick's driving forces, Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving, with the 156 handsome pages costing you just £10.

While you're over there, have a look at Sidekick's other publications (all produced to the same high standard), and their rather splendid website, which contains some really excellent reviews, among other features.

Oh, and my four poems in the book (all previously unpublished) are Bullfinch; Watching Woodcocks, 25.4.10; ID (about Collared Doves) and Evidence (about Long-eared Owls).

I'll be returning to this book soon with a look at a few of the other poets featured, but in the meantime, get hold of a copy, and enjoy.

That was the month that was

Well, the madness that was April and NaPoWriMo 2011 is all over. It was the first time I'd taken part since 2007, and although I'm not sure how much of what was written will stand the test of time (by which I mean, will I still think it's worth keeping a month from now), it was a great exercise in forcing me to make time for writing every day. It also pushed me in one or two different directions, which could be interesting.

Anyway, I've taken the posts down for now, but as soon as I get a moment or two in the next week, I'll post them all to a page that's now listed in the bar at the top of this blog. Hopefully I can get the formatting, etc, to work a bit better. In the meantime, thanks very much to all those who offered advice and congratulations.

Stratford reading CANCELLED

Unfortunately, tonight's Nine Arches Press reading and open mic at Stratford Town Hall has had to be cancelled - apologies for any inconvenience if you were planning on coming along.

Shindig revisited

Monday night was the latest Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig, at The Western in Leicester, and the new venue seemed to be working out very well, with a full room once again.

The format - open mic, two readers, more open mic, two readers - is a tried and tested one, and there was the usual pleasing variety of styles among the open mic-ers. The standard's really impressively high, too.

I won't go into too much detail, as Gary Longden has reviewed the evening here, but Maria Taylor and Kathy Bell were excellent, with the former's more ebullient tone contrasting nicely with the latter's more elegaic approach. Maria has a chapbook coming out from Nine Arches next year, which'll be well worth looking out for.

After my spot (I was standing in for Luke Kennard, who'll now be reading in June), Matthew Stewart read from his new HappenStance chapbook, Inventing Truth. I enjoyed it a great deal. Living and working in Spain, as he does, gives his poetry a distinct flavour, and the book is much concerned with questions of identity, the part played in it by language, and the difficulty of belonging to quite different societies.

I'll be reviewing it properly on here in the future, but it was lovely to meet Matthew at last after many an email conversation over the last few years. I first came across his work when doing some judging for the Plough Prize (an excellent poem called Milko, which features in this book), and he's been a regular presence in UK poetry mags too, so it's good to see the chapbook out there. He's a fine poet with a style that's deceptively simple and very distinctive.

Oh, and finally, the usual setlist:

Things Left In Hotel Rooms

Waiting To Cross

Zugunruhe

Fantasia For Glass Harmonica

Custard Apple

Smoke

Swifts

Happiness

Early birds

When I was a kid, at least once every summer holiday, my parents would get me and my sisters up at an unearthly hour and take us for a walk up to 'The Rocks' (as everyone locally knows them) - actually the Warren Hills part of Charnwood Lodge.

After the initial shock of being dragged from under the covers, I always found it incredibly exciting. The world, even the very small and very familiar world of a child, looks quite different at 4.30am. It sounds different too.

I could feel the same frisson yesterday morning, when I joined poet Jo Bell and her boatmates for a dawn chorus walk around Wadenhoe, Northamptonshire, as part of their retracing of the steps of Denys Watkins-Pitchford (better known to readers as 'BB').

The weather was perfect, and within a few minutes of starting we'd heard a Cuckoo (my first so far this year). Blackbirds, Robins, Dunnocks, Chaffinches and Great Tits were of course among the loudest participants, but there were encouraging numbers of Song Thrushes, too, and plenty of Blackcaps, Chiffchaffs and Willow Warblers.

Yellowhammers were notable by their absence. I'd guess BB would have heard plenty back in the 60s, when he was writing his book. The same could be said of Corn Buntings. It would have been too much to expect to be lucky enough to hear a Nightingale, although again I'd imagine they were once pretty common birds in the area.

But anyway, it was all thoroughly inspiring. Back at the narrowboat, we had a mini poetry reading over welcome cups of tea to round things off, before I headed off to catch up on my sleep, and the others continued on their odyssey through the heart of England.

New Walk

Time for another intermission in the constant stream of hastily-written NaPoWriMo poems, this time to flag up Issue 2 of Leicester-based literary mag New Walk.

It well and truly confirms the good impression made by the debut issue back in the autumn, with poetry from, among others, Alice Oswald, Carrie Etter, Matthew Stewart, Dan Wyke, Tom Pow, D A Prince and  Martyn Crucefix, plus fiction from Bill Jones and Robert McGowan.

Best of all, perhaps, given how difficuklt it can be to find extensive writing about poetry these days, there's a wealth of good reviews, essays and comment. J M Coetzee writes on Zbigniew Herbert, Martin Stannard (the academic, not the poet) on Larkin's Letters To Monica, and there's much more - I look forward to getting stuck into it this weekend.

Among the reviews, there's Geoffrey Heptonstall's take on hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. I'll take a closer look at it on here later (probably after NaPoWriMo is finished), but for now I'll just say that I'm grateful to him for such a thoughtful and generous response to the book.

Shindig! in Leicester

Just a quick break from the madness of NaPoWriMo to let you know that the latest Nine Arches Press Shindig takes place at The Western, on Western Road, Leicester, at 7.30pm on April 18th.

Featured readers are Maria Taylor, Kathleen Bell, Matthew Stewart and myself, and there will also be open mic slots avilable on the door. Admission, as always, is free.

Matthew's going to be reading fresh from the launch of his new HappenStance chapbook Inventing Truth, which I'll be reviewing on here before too long.