David Hart on RS Thomas

I enjoyed reading this double review, at Stride, of RS Thomas's Uncollected Poems and Poems To Elsi - David Hart has an interesting take on the whole question of how a famous poet's work is approached (and Thomas was of course not just famous but also, by contemporary poetry standards, a big-seller).

A brief cricketing interlude

No, don't worry, I'm not going to start on about the Ashes or what Australia need to do to reverse their decline (build a time machine?). I just thought I'd point you in the direction of this little interview with Derek Randall, a player who was one of my two great heroes when I was a kid (David Gower was the other). In part it was because his 174 in the Centenary Test was just about at the time I was becoming aware of cricket, and in part it was down to his fielding, incredible then and even now, in an era of much higher standards, among the best ever seen. But mainly, I suspect, it was because 'Arkle' came across exactly as he does here - a down-to-earth Nottinghamshire lad who got lucky and remained grateful throughout a long and successful career (he's far too modest about the role he played in making Notts a major power in the 1980s).

Blackbox Manifold 10

The latest issue of Blackbox Manifold has gone live - it includes work by Billy Cancel, Rick Crilly, Josh Ekroy, Michael Farrell, Joanna Grigg, Bernard Henrie, Joan Harvey, David Herd, Beau Hopkins, Drew Milne & John Kinsella (together), Peter Larkin, Robert Mueller, Sandeep Parmar, Peter Riley, Jennifer Scappettone, Kerrin P Sharpe, Nathan Thompson, Corey Wakeling, Duncan White and Rachel Zolf, plus an essay by Sam Ladkin on Frank O'Hara, and a review of John Matthias (a poet I've been reading a lot of lately) by Adam Piette.

As ever, it's well worth trawling through the archive of previous issues for all sorts of new discoveries and hidden gems.

Rise, by Gill McEvoy

 

Gill McEvoy's first collection, The Plucking Shed, built on the many strengths of her Happenstance debut, Uncertain Days. Rise continues that steady and sure-footed progress, but ventures into new territory, too, and the result is her strongest work to date.

 

Themed collections seem to be the standard nowadays - that's nearly always a good thing, in my opinion, although that's not to say that there's not still room for a collection that's essentially just a gathering together of the best poems a poet has written since the last one. Rise, and especially the first half of the book, has the strong connecting thread of McEvoy's survival of ovarian cancer, and even more so the celebration of life it has inspired. But it's worth saying that even where that particular theme fades into the background slightly, the sequencing of the poems is extremely well achieved - each poem feels like the only possible one that could succeed the one that's gone before.

 

McEvoy could never be accused of overwriting - the subtlety and understatement of her poetry is a snug fit with that aforementioned theme, the fragility of life (all life, too, as she's a very astute observer of the natural world, of which more in a minute). McEvoy never tells the reader what to think. Instead, there's always enough space around the edges to allow you to follow the poem in more than one direction - the wrens in Roost, for example, "between the snaggled stems / as if a wind had fluted all the leaves / and blown them there" are symbols of both fragility in the face of nature, and defiance of those seemingly overwhelming forces.

 

I am, of course, predisposed to take a keen interest in poetry that features birds prominently, but one of the greatest pleasures of this collection is that McEvoy doesn't impose any sort of hierarchy on the natural world - a single leaf, or a gull, lifting from a slurried field, is accorded as much attention and prominence as, say, a rarer bird like a chough or waxwing, and consequently all feel real, rather than mere agents of the poet. There are neat reversals of expectation, too - in Birding/not Birding, a sky is kingfisher blue rather vice versa, another example of how diligently McEvoy focuses first on the small detail and the close at hand, opening gradually out to a wider perspective.

 

Metaphors are delicately deployed, and indeed at times McEvoy is willing to undermine or deny them. In Oncology Waiting Room, for example, a leaf powders to "threads of veins / a span of bones" while a few pages later, in Visitors "a leaf on a tree is a leaf on a tree". The effect is to recreate the compulsive looking for signs, omens and parallels that being brought face to face with mortality can engender, and the corresponding reaction, to attempt to confine yourself to a world of bare facts.

 

In the second half of the book, two sequences (the Nuala poems and the Almond Street poems), take McEvoy's work in a different direction, most notably by moving away from the first person. It's skilfully done, especially as the threads followed earlier continue through this less obviously personal work, and sequences suit McEvoy's patient unfolding of effect perfectly. The best, on this evidence, is still to come.

 

You can buy Rise here.

 

I'll be interviewing Gill McEvoy, and featuring several poems from Rise, in the coming weeks - keep reading...

Weddings, parties, anything...

Now for a double dose of self-promotion. Here's the cover of The Elephant Tests, my new collection from Nine Arches Press - you can read more about it and buy it here, or alternatively, here.

With the release of a new book, thoughts inevitably turn to the open road, to readings and workshops and other chances to show off this shiny new volume. So, if you're running any of those, and have need of a fully house-trained poet with a mild ornithological obsession, then don't hesitate to drop me a line using the link on the righthand side of this blog, or through my Twitter address, @polyolbion.

With advance warning, I can travel to most UK locations easily enough, and my demands are very few. They don't even involve cake anymore.

Hinterland on Shindig

There's a really nice review of last Monday's Shindig by Rebecca Bird at Hinterland Journal - you can read it here. It's hard to disagree with any of her assessments of the other readers, and I'm very grateful for her comments on my own reading.

While you're at it, have a look at Hinterland more generally. Edited by Rebecca and Ian Parks, it's already featured some high-quality work from the likes of Roy Marshall and Maria Taylor, and it's on the lookout for more.

Launching The Elephant Tests

Maybe it was the fact of reading with the doors wide open behind us, thanks to the balmy weather, but there definitely seemed to be an outdoor vibe to last night's Nine Arches Press/Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig. As ever, the poetry in the open mic slots and the featured readings ranged far and wide.

It was also the launch of my new Nine Arches collection, The Elephant Tests, and it was great to be able to give the poems their first airing (well, sort of - many of them have been read at the Shindig open mic over the last three years) in the company of so many fine poets, not least the other featured readers, David Morley (pictured below), Zeandrick Oliver and Kate Fox.

I've talked before about David's forthcoming Carcanet collection, The Gypsy and the Poet, and the poems from it are outstanding (especially The Invisible Gift). But the final poem he read, just finished earlier in the day, was as good as anything else we heard in a superb reading.

Zeandrick's chapbook Secretions, from New Fire Tree Press, is a thing of beauty, a work of art before you even get started on the writing, and he read from it confidently and well. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend - he managed to pull off the difficult trick of a Frank O'Hara homage that sounded both natural and original.

Kate Fox is a familiar voice from radio, and had just spent time as poet in residence at the Glastonbury Festival, but after assuring us that she's had a shower since, she delivered a great set that had the audience demanding she return for encores. There's a great deal of humour in her work, but there's a great deal more too - her poem about her father was touchingly honest, while her piece on call centres added anger to the mix. I think that's because it, and many of her other poems, use northern vernacular and speech patterns not simply to sound somehow 'authentic', but to question how they're heard and seen by the rest of society. I bought her book, the splendidly titled Fox Populi, to read more.

It always feels unfair picking out particular open mic readers. Jayne Stanton never fails to leave an impression, and Roy Marshall and Rebecca Fox were two more personal favourites in what was a uniformly strong showing. Steve Carroll's closing poem was great, especially if you remember some of Leicester's now-vanished watering holes, while Gary Carr's poem was a little masterpiece of allusion and the use of sound, being constructed wholly of initials. Shindig goes from strength to strength - it was a privilege to be part of it.

Shindig in Leicester

This Monday (July 8th), I'm reading at the latest Nine Arches Press and Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig, at the usual venue of The Western, 70 Western Road, Leicester.

Special guests are Kate Fox, David Morley, Zeandrick Oliver and me. David needs absolutely no introduction, to readers of this blog or poetry fans more generally, but the poems I've heard from his forthcoming Carcanet collection are absolutely outstanding, and he's always a riveting reader of his own work. Zeandrick is a student at De Montfort University in Leicester, and I have to admit I don't know his work at all - I look forward to hearing it.

Finally, I'm pretty sure Kate Fox was there at one of my first-ever readings (well, mini-readings), an anthology launch at the Lit & Phil in Newcastle. She was, and still is, a top-notch performer of her own  work (she's a comedian, too), and has most recently been Poet In Residence at Glastonbury. 

It's free and it all starts at 7.30pm, and as usual there are open mic slots available - just sign up on the door if you're interested.

Magma launch reading

Next Monday (July 1st) sees the launch reading for Magma 56, edited by Helen Mort and Julia Bird. The featured readers are David Morley and Jack Underwood, and as usual the evening also includes short readings from many of the other poets featured in this issue (myself included). As always, it's held at The Troubadour, Earl's Court. It's been a long while since I've been to one, and even longer since I featured in the magazine, so I'm looking forward to it a lot. And if any friends fancy meeting in London beforehand for a drink and a poetry chat, drop me a line.

Brightest Black

My old friend Mark Howard Jones has a new book out now - Brightest Black is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions, and promises "16 stories, a hundred nightmares". I've written about Mark's work before, and his tales of the macabre, bizarre and downright dark go from strength to strength - as always there's an elegaic side to his writing that lifts it out of any neat genre pigeonhole (spurious as they generally are). As I've also said before, his work needs no other recommendation than that the late Ray Bradbury was a fan - it doesn't get much better than that.

An evening at Wordsmiths & Co

Yesterday, I tackled the A14 and the snarled-up Coventry ring road to get to Warwick Arts Centre. Gig-goers among you will know that it sits on the campus of Warwick University, and that the campus is actually nearer Coventry.

I've got a lot of fond memories of it because of some great gigs I've seen there. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the last time I was in the small theatre I was in last night, it was to see Julian Cope, which is always an experience.

This time, though, it was for the last of this season's Wordsmiths & Co shows, run by Nine Arches Press and Apples & Snakes. I'm hugely grateful to regular host Jo Bell for inviting me to join a line-up of Lorna Meehan, David Morley, and Luke Wright. To read with names like those would be a privilege and a pleasure anyway, but it's the format of the shows that really makes things special. Each poet does a short reading, and is then interviewed by Jo, turning it into a poetry talkshow.

Lorna read first - she's a classically trained actress, and uses her voice superbly. There's a lot of energy in her performance, but she allows the listener time to take in the subtler shifts of language, too - I only wish we could have heard more.

I read five poems from my forthcoming book, The Elephant Tests, and got a good response. I'm determined that, by the time I've done a couple more readings, I'll have memorised a hardcore of the poems from the book.

The interview part was great. Jo's questions were pretty searching without being obvious, and it's actually a good way of finding out exactly what you think about your own writing and methods etc. Certainly, driving home later, I found myself mentally expanding upon and revising my answers.

For a 'page poet', David Morley is a very physical performer of his work (for reasons he explained last night), but I think what really makes him so compelling to watch is that he leavens that with a great stillness when necessary. His John Clare themed poems from his forthcoming book The Gypsy and the Poet were superb - it'll be a must-read.

I've seen Luke Wright read a couple of times previously, and he's never less than hugely entertaining, but I think he continues to get better each time, not least because the satirical edge to his work is both sharper and yet somehow less obvious. In fact, he and David were both fascinating on the subject of poetry with "palpable designs" on the reader - if anything last night showed that their seemingly very different approaches shared a lot of similarities.

And that was that. If ever an evening was worth a bit of gridlock, this was it - I just hope the audience enjoyed it as much as we did. Just to prove it, here's a picture of a very happy line-up, post-show.

The chase is on

This is a terrible photo, my excuse being that it was at long range and I was sitting on a rocking boat when I took it, in the bay off Husavik, Iceland, a couple of weeks ago.

It shows an unfortunate Kittiwake (of which there were huge numbers) being pursued by a pair of Arctic Skuas, with a Great Skua waiting to rob them as soon as it gets the chance. The skuas usually force their victims to disgorge the contents of their crops, which they catch and eat in mid-air, although the Great Skua, or Bonxie, also regularly predates eggs and nestlings, or takes carrion.

We didn't see that many of either skua species, so it was exciting to see both together like this.

Sneak preview

My new poetry collection, The Elephant Tests, is out from Nine Arches Press next month. You can read more about it here, and as with all Nine Arches titles you'll be able to buy it from the Inpress Online Shop. Recent additions to those titles include Angela France's Hide, Chris McCabe and Jeremy Reed's Whitehall Jackals, and Mario Petrucci's anima - I haven't seen the last of those yet, but I can recommend the other two very highly.

Wordsmiths & Co

I'm taking part in the latest instalment of Wordsmiths & Co, at Warwick Arts Centre, a week on Monday (June 17th) at 7.45pm.

I'll be joining host Jo Bell and poets Lorna Meehan, David Morley and Luke Wright for what's the UK’s first live poetry talk show.

It aims to feature poets you know from the pages of books and from the festival stages, with Jo encouraging us to spill secrets, tell tales and share the magic of words in an intimate performance space.

It's a collaboration between Nine Arches Press, Apples and Snakes and Warwick Arts Centre. You can read more about it and find out how to book tickets here, and there's also a chance to watch videos of the performances from Series 1 and 2 (this is the closing event of the latter).

Otwituaries

There's an awful lot of rubbish on Facebook and Twitter, but Andy Jackson's Otwituaries manage to be funny, touching, and genuinely poetic (not that that should come as any surprise). I only discovered yesterday that they're also on this blog.

Helen Ivory at Peony Moon

I make no apology for sending you in the direction of Michelle McGrane's fine blog Peony Moon, for the second time in a couple of weeks.

The latest post is this remarkably honest and enlightening interview with Helen Ivory on the writing of her new Bloodaxe collection, Waiting For Bluebeard. The specifics are fascinating, but there's also a lot there that applies to the whole creative process more generally.

Antiphon 7

The latest issue of Antiphon is here - there's a truly impressive range of writers featured, including Helen Mort, Bernard O'Donoghue, River Wolton, Alastair Noon, Suzannah Evans, Jonathan Davidson, Pam Thompson, Geraldine Monk and Ian Duhig. Eclectic and exciting, and certainly the best issue yet.

Birds and People

I'll give you fair warning - I'm likely to blog about this book a lot over the next year or so. It arrived in the office on Friday and I can honestly say no review copy's ever been so eagerly awaited. Eight years of research and writing have gone into it, and at first glance it's truly extraordinary.

Mark Cocker's Birds Britannica has long been a favourite of mine, and here he does for the birds of the world what he previously did for the species of these islands. Which is to say, considers them in the round, and especially in terms of their interaction with humans. Folklore, myth, literature, science, anthropology and birdwatching mingle in these pages, and he continues to manage the difficult balancing act between getting over a wealth of hard information, and maintaining great readability.

This time, there's the added bonus of David Tipling's superb photography - it makes it a book that you can't stop flicking through every time you've got a spare moment.

Anyway, I'll be returning to the subject soon, but keep an eye out - it's released this summer.

Why isn't poetry popular?

Interesting blog post here, at the Sidekick Books blog, on the popularity or otherwise of poetry. In the light of Salt's announcement this week that they'll soon be ceasing to publish individual collections of poetry, concentrating instead on their Best British Poetry anthology series, it's an issue that's bound to get a lot of discussion in the coming weeks. Not sure about the whole 'reading poetry while sitting on the toilet' debate, though...

Some recent reading

Browsing through my blogs list this week, I enjoyed reading this post on Andrew Shields' always excellent blog. It helps that You Are The Everything is just about my favourite REM song, too.

Meanwhile, over at the Magma blog, there's Andrew Philip's thoughtful review of John F Deane's Snow Falling On Chestnut Hill. I've seen plenty of online debate recently about what a poetry review should do - this one makes me want to read more of the poetry in question, and to find out more about the poet. That's what I'm looking for, really.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Cuckoos clocked

Down at a local nature reserve last weekend (well, it's an old sewage works, to be exact), I heard the strange, bubbling call of a female Cuckoo, something I haven't heard locally in a long time. In no time at all, two males were in attendance, replying with their familiar song. One remained fairly elusive, although I caught glimpses, but the other took up position on a tree near me, so despite the failing light I was able to get a few pics.

When I went back on Monday night, one of the males was still around, singing constantly, and there was an occasional distant second male, but neither sight nor sound of the female. It's a site with lots of Reed Warblers, though, one of the Cuckoo's preferred host birds, so she might well just have been sitting tight, looking for a suitable nest to parasitise.

Alvin Pang at Peony Moon

Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon offers a constant stream of the best new poetry out there, so it's well worth checking daily. Today, it features Singapore poet Alvin Pang, whose Arc collection When The Barbarians Arrive is out now. You can read four poems from the book here.

I like the look of that a lot - I'll be ordering it later. I've been reading a lot of older, 'back catalogue' poetry recently, so it's time to get back to the here and now.

After-work birding

I've not been doing much twitching at all the last couple of years, even within the county, as I've been concentrating on working my local patch, but now that the longer evenings and better weather are here, it's hard to resist the temptation to stop off and do some birding on the way home.

I called in at Cossington Meadows last night to have a look for the Ring Ouzels that have been reported there in recent days. The female showed up just after I got there - it remained frustratingly half-obscured in a little hollow for much of the time, but John Hague managed a decent digiscoped shot, and it occasionally came right out into full view.

The Bullfinches that John mentions were good to see, too, there were a few Lapwings around, and an interesting Wheatear a little further along the track. It looked large, to me, with long wings and a shortish tail, all suggestive of Greenland Wheatear, but I'm not sure if it was highly-coloured enough to be one. The timing's right, too, with most Wheatears of the nominate race having already gone through, but I'll have to put it down as a probable.

Over on Rectory Marsh, this Little Egret was the highlight - strange to think that 25 years ago it would have been causing major twitching activity.

Postcards from Berlin 3

Sitting around in the Tiergarten, there were huge numbers of small birds, some residents, others presumably moving through on migration. Nuthatches were plentiful, singing from bare branches, squabbling with Great Tits over nest holes, and in this instance, foraging on the ground to within a few feet of my bench.