An – excuse me – DAMN fine poetry course!

            

Twin Peaks might very well have been the best TV programme of all time. It was certainly one of the most influential. I'm talking here primarily about the first two series. In fact, primarily the first, although anything to do with David Lynch deserves watching and rewatching. I think I might be inspired to dig out a few of my favourite clips and post them on here in celebration.

So, this looks fantastic – a Zoom-based poetry course on writing poems inspired by Twin Peaks, with tutor Chrissy Williams. Full details, including how to book, are on that link. 

Spelt Magazine

The first ever issue of Spelt is out now, and you can read more about it and buy a copy here. It promises "poetry and creative non-fiction that has something to say about the rural experience", which leaves plenty of scope.

The full submission guidelines are here.

Harry Guest, 1932-2021

Sad news at the end of last week the death of Welsh-born poet Harry Guest, a major figure in the British Poetry Revival of the late 60s and 70s. I have his 2002 Collected Poems, A Puzzling Harvest, and it's excellent, showing a poet who, despite his connection to the avant-garde, remained opened to a very wide range of influences throughout his career. 

While I was searching for material on him, I came across this excellent post on Rob A Mackenzie's Surroundings blog, from way back in 2006, in which he makes the same point (and others), far more eloquently than I could. The whole series of posts that it's part of are very rewarding to read, too.

Magma 79

I received my copy of Magma 79 yesterday, and as always there's a really good mixture of poetry (including poems from the latest Magma Open Pamphlet Competition), articles and reviews. I haven't had chance to read much of it yet, and have to admit I went straight to two poets I always enjoy – Tony Williams and David Morley – but I look forward to having a longer read tonight.

It also includes my own reviews of collections by Robert Selby, Katrina Naomi and Robert Alan Jamieson. I won't tell you here what I thought about them, other than that they all had something to recommend them - you'll need to read Magma to find out more. 

The Las

I stumbled across this article on the BBC website last week sometime, and it set me thinking. I can remember, back in 1988, all the fuss in the music press about The Las, when the original single version of There She Goes came out. It was hugely tuneful and jangly (but then, so were a lot of things back then), and seemed to promise a great deal. 

I can remember the eager wait for their debut album, the constant delays, and then finally hearing it on a friend's record player. And I can remember being disappointed.

I know. I know you're supposed to buy into the whole lost genius story, but I can't.

I remember at the time thinking that it all sounded just too desperate to nod in the direction of classic British 1960s guitar pop. The review on AllMusic says that it avoids that, and compares it favourably with work by Oasis and Blur in that respect, but I can't agree. I wasn't a big fan of either of those bands, but I'd say that both at least steered clear of straightforward pastiche. The Las, to me, didn't, or at least not always.

I saw them live, on my 21st birthday, in fact, and got the same impression from the gig. It was good. They were good. But they didn't blow me away. It all felt a bit contrived.

And that's it, really. There are plenty of you who will disagree with me, and I'd be delighted to be persuaded of the report of my ways. But for now, at least, the legend feels a lot more interesting than the music. 

Changing The Face Of Poetry

Lockdown has been something of a mixed blessing for writing poetry. On the one hand, there's been a lot more time to do so. On the other, there's been less inspiration, for me at least, because the days have been so same.

So here's something a bit different. And there's the same here. Singer and songwriter Tally Koren is looking at ways of turning poetry into songs, as has been done here.

Take a look, and think about submitting something.

Fighting fire with fire

Up front, a warning. This post is about cricket, and pretty much nothing else. And it's long. 

There's obviously a long way to go, given that we have no idea whether this summer will pan out anything like normal, but the cricket press and forums are starting to turn their attention to England's Ashes tour next winter, and to who might make up the team. In particular, large parts of the cricket press and public seem to have decided that the only way England are going to win is with out and out fast bowlers.

That always sets the alarm bells ringing for me. In my lifetime, England have won four Ashes series in Australia. They suggest that there are far more important things for England to concentrate on than "fighting fire with fire" by picking quicks. 

In 2010-11, Andrew Strauss's team won 3-1, with a four-man bowling attack. None of them were what I'd call fast – Chris Tremlett came closest, but his height and extra bounce were more important weapons. Jimmy Anderson and Tim Bresnan were good old-fashioned English seamers, and Graeme Swann played a big part with his off-spin. What was even more important was a batting line-up that, other than the first innings at Brisbane and most of the Perth match, coped superbly with the Aussies' pace and bounce.

In 1986-87, Graham Dilley was the closest England had to a genuine quick, but he was still more like fast-medium, as were Botham, Small and DeFreitas. Spin twins John Emburey and Phil Edmonds helped give Mike Gatting control in the field, but again the vital thing was a batting line-up that, Allan Lamb apart, dealt well with the Australian attack.

In 1978-79, the Aussies were weakened by the loss of their Packer players, and England beat them 5-1 (we'd lost a few too, but they were pretty much all players on the downhill slope). Now, Bob Willis played a significant role, and Big Bob was genuinely sharp. A young Ian Botham was quicker than he sometimes appeared, too, and he was among the wickets. But Mike Hendrick, a classic English seamer if ever there was one, was just as important, and off-spinners Geoff Miller and John Emburey were both highly successful.

Only in 1970-71, which I don't remember, did an English fast bowler genuinely dominate the series. John Snow was the quickest, the nastiest and the best on both sides, and the Aussies had no answer.

Looking back beyond that, it's fair to say that the two previous England wins in Australia could be put down to out and out fast bowling – 1954-55 ('Typhoon' Tyson blowing the Aussies away in two tests) and 1932-33 (Larwood, Voce and Bodyline).

What has always been important in Ashes wins in Australia has been the batting. Batting as long as possible, and wearing down the Aussie pace attack, which is rarely anything but impressive (OK, 1986-87 was an exception there). Boycott, Edrich, Luckhurst etc., in 70-71. Randall, Gower and an all-round performance in 78-79. Chris Broad, with help from Gower and Gatting in 86-87. And Strauss, Cook, Trott, Pietersen and Bell in 10-11. When we've lost over there, it's generally been because we haven;t coped with their quick bowling. In the 90s, there was Shane Warne to cope with too. 

I have a horrible feeling the squad will be packed with Archer, Wood, Stone and maybe others only because they are fast. I'd rather it be packed with the best bowlers, regardless, and even more importantly the best batsmen, the ones who will fight it out and bat for days if necessary. 

Might have beens

This is a really good article about Aussie off-spinner Jason Krejza, and his brief but memorable test career. He comes across as a thoughtful chap, wistful rather than embittered, and it's hard not to think he was unlucky in the way he was treated by the selectors. I remember watching that debut against India, and thinking that he was a name who'd be on the scene for years. 

Forgotten Good Poems

This is a really interesting Twitter feed. It's a reminder of how ephemeral much poetry is – it's so easy for it to slip past us in magazines or online, or in slim volumes which sit in the bookcase for years after their first reading.

Every now and then, I come across a poem that I decide I don't want to forget about in a hurry, so I copy it out by hand into a little personal anthology. Anybody else do that?

ADHD and mental health

This is a really excellent post about ADHD, and mental health generally, from Kirsten Irving. If nothing else, it ought to encourage all of us to think hard about it, and about how we treat ourselves, which of course inevitably affects how we are with other people.

Poetry readings

Interesting blog post here from Sue Ibrahim. Of course, it's getting difficult to remember exactly what a poetry reading is like, and I've only seen a couple on Zoom during the past year. But it is one of the things that I'm now missing, and looking forward to returning to when things get back to, well, not normal, but what will pass for the new normal.

It set me thinking about different reading styles, and exactly what I want to hear at a reading, and I'll post about that in the near future. But, in the meantime, I'd be interested to hear any best/worst experiences.

Backlisted, again

I know I've mentioned it on here before, but I'm just going to give another plug to the Backlisted podcast. Over what now runs to more than 120 episodes, they've discussed a huge variety of books (mainly novels, although they've also touched on poetry and biography). Generally they try to shine a light on lesser-known if not downright obscure books, but they've also covered more mainstream works, too. Although, one of the pleasures of the podcast is that you usually end up realising the the book being discussed is not exactly what you thought it was, anyway. 

A day to remember/forget

I stumbled across this article the other day, and although I knew all about Brian Langford's record-breaking spell of bowling, I'd never come across the bit about Doug Insole before. Called out of retirement (after six years) to play in an injury crisis, a baby throws up all over his cricket bag on the train, and then he's run out for 0. 

That's the sort of story that makes cricket my favourite sport.

What made me want to read

It's World Book Day today, and there's an awful lot on Twitter relating to it. My favourite so far has been from Kirsten Irving (@KofTheTriffids), who has posted about some of the books that sparked her love of reading as a child. I'm about to shamelessly steal the idea here.

I can't honestly remember much of what I read when I first learned, except for Angela Banner's Ant and Bee books, but as I got older I became a voracious reader. Non-fiction, for a start. I used to virtually memorise Playfair Cricket and Football Annuals each year, and of course there were bird books. My grandmother bought me an RSPB guide, which had great artwork and short, pithy species accounts, some of which I remember to this day. A while ago, I dug it out, and found that it was written by David Saunders, who is a monthly contributor to Bird Watching, the magazine I now edit. 

When it came to fiction, I read The Hobbit on the recommendation of a friend, and loved it, and went on to The Lord of the Rings, and loved that too. But one book that really stands out in the memory was a slimmish volume that I got out of Coalville Library.

It was called The Goalkeeper's Revenge, a collection of short stories for kids by Bill Naughton (probably better known for his play Alfie, which was turned into the Michael Caine film). Set mainly in 1930s Lancashire (although at least one story was set in Ireland), it was both extremely readable, and yet full of period and local detail that could have been daunting but that just made you want to know more.

One of the things that still sticks in the memory from it was the food. There's one story where some boys go to a fair, and ponder what to spend their few pennies on. Half of them come down on the side of food (a reminder that in a 30s mill town, having enough to eat wasn't a given), and buy roast potatoes, and hot black peas.

In another story, about a deaf friend of the narrator, there are meat pies that still spring to mind even now, every time I see, let alone eat, a pie.

I have no idea if it's still in print, but I'd imagine there are plenty of secondhand copies around, as it was a favourite in libraries and school libraries. It stands up well even reading it as an adult, and I suspect kids now would love it just as much as I did then, because what rings most true about it is the way that kids talk and behave.

The Lucksmiths

Wikipedia, and the Internet generally, are dangerous things. Yesterday, I heard the end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles on Radio 4, and looked it up online, never having read it. 

Wikipedia told me that its ending was inspired by Thomas Hardy having witnessed the execution of a woman called Elizabeth Martha Brown, for the murder of her abusive husband, in 1856, and that an Australian band, called The Lucksmiths, had recorded a song about it on their 1995 album The Green Bicycle Case.

Now, that immediately rang a bell, because years ago I read a book about the Green Bicycle Murder, which took place just outside Leicester in 1919. But the album also contains a song called The Tichborne Claimant, which sent me off reading about that particularly long and convoluted affair. Among the interesting things I picked up was that it involved the same Tichborne family as that of the poet Chidiock Tichborne, executed for his part in The Babington Plot against Elizabeth I, although not before he had written the famous elegy you can see on that page.

All of which is a very long way of getting to the point. If you've followed this blog over the years, you'll know that I have a very big soft spot for Australian bands. Two in particular, The Triffids and The Go-Betweens, but there are others. And I think The Lucksmiths will be joining them as favourites. The album mentioned above is excellent, both musically and lyrically, and is more than a little reminiscent of The Go-Betweens, and I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of their work. The follow-up album, I notice, is called What Bird Is That, which has to be a good omen.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus

A bit late, I know, but the sun's starting to break through, and there are daffodils out, so Happy St David's Day!

What I Do To Get Through

I'm proud and delighted to say that I was one of the many contributors to the above book, What I Do To Get Through, edited by Olivia Sagan and James Withey. It's a book about different approaches to coping with, and getting through depression, and as you might have guessed, my contribution was about birdwatching, and how it can benefit your mental health.

You can buy it here, but of course you can also order it at your local independent bookshop too.

Writing advice

Someone on Twitter posted this link the other day – it's a little compendium of thoughts on writing and writers (and indeed, creativity and life more generally). It comes from a huge variety of sources, so of course it's contradictory, and of course there will be parts of it that you dismiss as absolute nonsense, but there's probably something there to suit most writers, and most moods. Browsing through does make you think a bit harder about your own writing.

Purple Crow – rewild your inbox

One of my poems, Starlings, from my last collection The Elephant Tests, is featured today on Purple Crow, which you can read more about here and here.

Purple Crow promises to deliver all sorts of wildlife-related content to your inbox, from fact-based features to more conversational pieces, and from top-class photography to poetry that focuses on natural history.

There are paid and free subscriptions available, so check it out.

Iamb – poetry seen and heard

OK, I know I've said this before, but I've decided it's time to start using this blog again, and for the reason I initially set it up - to talk about poetry, mainly, although there will be diversions into other literature, history, natural history, birdwatching, and cricket.

So I'm going to start by pushing you in the direction of the splendid Iamb, a website that not only allows you to read the work of a huge variety of poets, but also to hear them read their work.

They've been released in four 'waves' so far, with further to follow, and you can read and hear some of my own poems (both old and new) here.

It's a really beautifully put-together site, for which Mark Antony Owen deserves huge credit – you can also enjoy his own poetry here.

I saw it pointed out this week that poetry publishers have generally been slow to get work out there in audiobooks, the reason being, I suspect, that it's a time-consuming and potentially expensive process, but I suspect it's the future of poetry publishing, or a big part of it. When it's done well, as here, it adds a whole new dimension to the poetry.

Backlisted: The Diary of a Nobody

I think I've mentioned my admiration for the podcast Backlisted on here before. I've certainly mentioned my admiration for George and Weedon Grossmith's wonderful The Diary of a Nobody.

A recent episode looked at this comic classic, and very good it is too. Among other things, they mention something that always bothers me, namely that Charles Pooter isn't actually very pooterish, our at least not in the sense that it is usually used in the modern media.

Anyway, have a browse of the other episodes while you're there. I've enjoyed those on Chandler, Tolkien, and JL Carr in the past, but there are a lot of interesting ones. 

Derek Mahon, 1941-2020

I was very sad to hear of the death of poet Derek Mahon earlier today, after a short illness.

Here's what The Guardian had to say about him, and here's the story from The Irish Times.

I like an awful lot of his poetry, and if I had to pick a favourite poem of his it would probably be A Disused Shed In Co. Wexford, but you'll probably see that elsewhere, so I thought I'd post a link to the first Mahon poem I can remember reading, The Last of the Fire Kings. Given his Belfast background, and the time of its writing, it's a brave, outspoken statement.

Back to my roots

Over the last year or two, I've been trying to trace some family history, and at the end of last year, I sent off for one of Ancestry.com's DNA tests. 

When the results came back, there were no huge surprises - more Scottish and Irish blood than I'd expected, and some Norwegian/Icelandic ancestry (but not much). 

This week, though, they sent an email updating the results, because they have now refined the process further and have more DNA samples to compare. And the results are very intriguing (well, to me, at least).

They came out as: 

39% Welsh, and specifically south-east Wales, which is my mother's mother's side of the family, and which I already have a lot of background on.

30% English, particularly Devon and Cornwall. Again, I knew about the latter part.

18% Scottish - we'd always known that my dad had some Scottish blood, but this is much more than expected, so it's one of the areas I really want to dig into.

3% Irish - not sure where this comes from at all.

10% Norwegian/Icelandic - certainly no idea where this comes from. Reading the background notes, this isn't anything to do with 'Viking' blood, as that would come under the other headings. It's more recent than that. There is a bit of a Norwegian link to Cardiff, but I think more likely this is from my dad's side of the family (some of whom were trawlermen), possibly connected to the Scottish link.

Funnily enough, I also came across this story online yesterday. It confirms that, back in the so-called Dark Ages at least, what we once thought were ethnic groups were often nothing of the sort - 'Viking' came to be applied to people with no Scandinavian DNA at all, in the same ways as 'Anglo-Saxons' came to be used to refer to any of the Germanic settlers who arrived in the UK - Frisians, Franks and others would have been among them. 

Comets NEOWISE and McNaught

Last weekend, as I was going to bed, I noticed a very bright light in the northern sky, not that far above the horizon. I stupidly assumed it was Venus or Jupiter, and that it was looking slightly blurred through the glass, so I didn't take a closer look with binoculars (you can sometimes pick out the main moons of Jupiter with a decent pair of bins).

Next day, I saw all sorts of things on Twitter that made it clear that it had been Comet NEOWISE. And of course, since then, there hasn't been a clear night to have another look, although it should be visible until around the end of the month.

It reminded me of Comet McNaught, from 2007 (also sometimes called the Great Comet of 2007), which was bright and pretty spectacular. It inspired a poem (in as much as a poem is ever inspired by one thing) that appeared in my first collection, Troy Town, which was published by Arrowhead Press in 2008. Here it is:


McNaught

That spray of light on the western horizon
this last fortnight is a comet. All the papers say so now.
The best of it was believing it was our discovery

but it seems a scientist at an Australian observatory
has been tracking its orbit for months. Yesterday, late,
as I walked back the long way round, the way I haven't

walked in years, I watched a single cloud
swallow half the heavens whole, but this morning
– oh my sungrazer, my hyperbola, my single apparition –

it was only the hills the stars have always hid behind.

Summer's here

So, its been a long time. What can I say? The whole Covid-19 lockdown situation has dominated everything for the past few months, and Polyolbion has had to take a back seat. But here I am again. It's July, and summer's here, sort of.

Those nice people at Candlestick Press have a new pamphlet, Ten Poems for Summer, for anyone in need of a bit of literary sustenance. It also, like all Candlestick's pamphlets, makes a nice alternative to a greetings card.

Of course, it's a pretty strange summer, and not just in terms of weather. There's been no cricket, for a start, although that will change next week, when England start to play a test series against the West Indies behind closed doors.

But while I was at the Candlestick website, I was reminded that among their other fine titles, they have Ten Poems about Cricket, which includes my own poem Two Orthodox Left-Armers. If you're missing the sound of leather on willow, you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy.