Today's Poem

As I mentioned last week, my Ringing Redstarts is today's poem over at Poetry Daily. It's from Troy Town, which is available now direct from Arrowhead Press, or by e-mailing me using the link on the right. If you would like to buy a copy from me, I'll also include a free copy of my HappenStance chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light.

Dylan & Dylan

There was no getting away from Dylan Thomas this weekend, with all the papers carrying reviews of The Edge Of Love, the new film about his complicated love life. I wouldn't have high hopes for it anyway, because as Simon Armitage says in All Points North, films about poets are generally pretty wretched, but this one has the additional handicap of Keira Knightley's acting.

But I have a bit of a problem with the whole concept, anyway. To me, it encourages people to treat the poetry itself as autobiography. It's the same sort of uncomfortable feeling I had with Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, or Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture. Not that they weren't both fine books, but I did feel that too much of the interest in both was down to prurient interest in the poets' lives, and indeed the other poets in their lives.

But enough complaining. Saturday's Guardian also contained the first in their latest series of giveaway booklets (chapbooks, in fact). They're all about great lyricists, and perhaps not surprisingly they started off with Bob Dylan. A small selection of lyrics (including Desolation Row, Visions of Joanna and Tangled Up In Blue) presented as poetry, plus an intro by Greil Marcus and two 1965 articles about the great man. We've talked before on here about whether lyrics are ever true poetry - this little book made a good case for, I think.

Coming soon

One of the poems from Troy Town - Ringing Redstarts - will be the Poem of the Day at Poetry Daily a week on Saturday (June 28th). In the meantime, have a good trawl through the site - it's a good place to catch up on poetry-related articles.

Salt snap up Andrew Philip

Great to hear that Andrew Philip - whose wonderful pamphlet Tonguefire was a standard-bearer for HappenStance - has had his manuscript The Ambulance Box accepted by Salt, for publication next year.

As Andrew says, Salt have a very strong list (I was in Borders this afternoon and was struck by what an eclectic but high-quality range they boast), and are also at the forefront of marketing poetry through the web, the potential of which they've probably only just started to explore

Anyway, it's the first must-buy of 2009 on my list - if you want to know exactly why, have a look on the HappenStance site and get hold of Tonguefire, or the Andrew Philip Sampler, just out. Proof that quality wins out.

PoetCasting pushes on

No sooner had I mentioned PoetCasting than Alex Pryce received the excellent news that she has secured Arts Council funding to continue the project until mid-2010. While the site will continue to showcase both emerging and established poets, it will also move into collaborations with poetry magazines and live poetry performance events, and will develop its own events. Sounds like it'll be going from strength to strength, and quite right too.

Hear, hear

A little while ago, I recorded four poems - At Home; Show, Don't Tell; Spurn; and The Memory Of Water - for Alex Pryce's excellent PoetCasting site, and they're now available to listen to here.

They'll be on the front page of the site for the next week or so, but I'll also put a link to them on my sidebar. And while you're at PoetCasting, take the time to trawl through the archives for a wide range of very fine poets reading their work. It's always illuminating to hear poems as they were intended. Enjoy!

Cynical opportunism

It’s not often I touch upon politics on this blog, but having spent most of the last 24 hours listening to endless analysis on radio and TV, I feel compelled to comment on David Davis’s resignation as an MP to “defend British liberties”. And yes, this is the same David Davis who served as an MP under Thatcher and Major. In fact, he was a Government whip; his distaste for parliamentary deals and so on evidently didn’t weigh so heavily with him then.

It’s hard to know where to start. What about the claim, by various of his friends and colleagues, and some in the media, that this is a brave and courageous decision? What definition of those words are they using? Because as far as I can see, Davis is risking next to nothing. At the very worst, he might lose his job (I have no idea whether or not he, like many MPs, already has a second job – it’d be nice to see a few of them get upset about that, too), in which case he’ll have to kick his heels, maybe while accepting a few well-paid directorships, for a couple of years until he gets selected for a safe Tory seat at the next General Election.

Except that he made sure to get the agreement of the Liberal Democrats NOT to stand against him in the forthcoming by-election. Given that they are the only realistic threat to him in the constituency, where’s the risk? He also knows full well that whatever he might say, people in Haltemprice and Howden will not vote purely on their views on the 42-day detention debate. They’ll vote, as they always do, on a whole range of issues, not least of them Davis’s own record as a constituency MP, which by all accounts is very good.

What about Davis’s so-called principles on this particular issue. He’s been keen to mention Magna Carta at every opportunity, but as far as I know, it didn’t make provision for holding prisoners for 28 days without charge. Davis has made no objection to that shorter (but still very long) period, just the 42 days. He’s no more an upholder of the principles of Magna Carta than Gordon Brown is. The inescapable conclusion is that what he’s doing has nothing to do with political conviction, and everything to do with opportunism and an ego running out of control. He realises, I suspect, that by losing the Tory leadership election a couple of years back he lost his only real chance of ever becoming PM, and now he’s making a last-ditch bid to grab the political spotlight – this is the act of a desperate man.

Finally, where was he in the 1980s, when the party for which he was and is an MP was trampling over all sorts of civil liberties in the UK, including press freedom and, more than anything, workers’ and union rights? Engineering strikes in order to use the police as the paramilitary wing of the Tory Party and crush the unions (the court actions that followed the 1984 Battle of Orgreave are very instructive) isn’t what you’d expect from a party concerned to uphold the rights of the individual. Strangely, the Tories, including Davis, don’t plan to repeal a single one of the anti-union laws should they come to power (and it’s to Labour’s shame that they’ve done little in that regard, too). We faced a very real terror threat then, too, but Davis and the Tories showed none of this new concern for civil liberties in Northern Ireland.

Personally, I see no reason to have 42 days detention, any more than I do 28. There are far easier and more transparent changes that could be made, if the security situation demands it. But even if I did share the same view as Davis, his position would stink to high heaven of hypocrisy of the worst kind.

New release

I received my copy of LouAnn Shephard Muhm's Breaking The Glass (Loonfeather Press) at the weekend, and a very fine debut collection it is, too. It comes highly recommended by no less a poet than Jane Hirshfield, who says of it:

"Breaking the Glass is a book of fierce heart and strong hands, glinting recognitions, and hard-won perception. Its many brief, bright shard-poems, especially, cut through surface consciousness, bringing the reader to unexpected and moving comprehension. Vulnerable with longing, fully alive, LouAnn Muhm’s words ring resonantly true."

Having read the manuscript to do a blurb for it myself, I can vouch for that. It's a very strong book, with not a word out of place. It's also a very nice looking book (regular visitors here will know that's a nice little bonus that I'm always looking for) - I like that cover photo.

I'll be posting a full review of it in a little while, but for now suffice to say it's a book I'm enjoying re-reading.

So, what are you waiting for? You can get hold of a copy yourself by clicking here.

Fisher featured

This week's Poem Of The Week over at The Guardian is Roy Fisher's The Running Changes. Not necessarily too representative of his work (but then what is, because he covers such a wide range of poetries?) - still, I like it a lot.

For a change, there's lots of good stuff in the comments section, too. I particularly liked the suggestion that the compound words in the second half of the poem are an echo of Anglo-Saxon poetry and its kennings, and Old Norse, for that matter - Eric Bloodaxe was the king of the Viking kingdom of York. He was also, as I mentioned a week or so ago, the rival of saga hero Egil Skallagrimmson.

Everything I read lately keeps leading me back to the so-called dark ages.

Worth the wait

I was interested to read this review in yesterday's Observer (there was another in Saturday's Guardian). Firstly, because it sounds like a book worth reading. Secondly, though, because of what it says about Mick Imlah not having released a full collection for 20 years.

Of course, that doesn't mean that he's not been busy, what with chapbooks, editing for magazines and anthologies, and so on. But it is a hell of a long time, making Imlah something of a poetry equivalent of The Blue Nile or My Bloody Valentine (not that it did them any harm). Does anyone know of a longer hiatus between full collections?

Anglo-Saxon attitude

Time for a look what's new over at Stride. Lots of new poetry, for a start, of which I liked these pieces by Matt Fallaize the best.

There's also these reviews, especially those of the Old English Poems and Riddles, and the Poems from Egil's Saga. I like the sound of the extracts from the former, and it's always good to see Anglo-Saxon poetry getting plenty of new interpretations (Jane Holland has an Old English translation appearing in her forthcoming third collection from Salt, for example). The alliterative stress metre that it uses can take some getting used to, but once you've tuned into it, it is, I think, capable of carrying more than just the elegaic tone for which it is usually noted. It certainly demands to be read aloud, so as the review suggests, an accompanying CD might have been a nice idea.

Regulars here will know that I'm a big fan of medieval Icelandic literature, especially the so-called 'family' sagas. Egil's is one of the big three, along with Njal's and Laxdaela, and although I wouldn't say it's my favourite (I'd always go for Njal's Saga), the title character is truly memorable, a psychopath quite capable of writing poetry on the spur of moment to save his life, so this book looks well worth checking out.

So Here We Are 13

Here's the latest in the So Here We Are series, from Tears In The Fence editor David Caddy. If you'd prefer, the full text is here. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it's always thought-provoking.

Hotfoot after the Redfoot

It's all birding just at the moment. I'd not managed to get out on my local patch since getting back from Spain, but last night I just had to make the effort to try to see the first-summer female Red-footed Falcon that has been hanging around Ingleby, in Derbyshire, for the last few days.

It's only about a 15-minute drive from my house, but once there I was faced with a walk of around a mile, alongside the Trent. I was glad I'd packed my wellies, because at one point the path is flooded to a depth of about 18 inches, but it's a nice atmospheric spot, if you can ignore the redundant towers of Willington Power Station just over the river, and a couple of gravel pits. There's the Anchor Church, a series of natural caves that were used by medieval hermits, and just a couple of miles downstream is Swarkestone Bridge and Causeway, the point at which Bonnie Prince Charlie decided to turn back to Scotland during his 1745 invasion of England (UA Fanthorpe wrote a poem, At Swarkestone Bridge, about this, which always annoys me a little bit because it talks about the 'Midlands plain' - it's not that flat for heaven's sake!). Upstream a mile or two, there's Repton, with its Anglo-Saxon crypt containing the remains of more than one king of Mercia, and where a huge Viking army wintered some time in the late 9th century. And of course, it has a strong poetry connection, WH Auden and James Fenton both having attended the public school there (funnily enough, I think one of the kings buried there shared Auden's first name, Wystan - I might be wrong though. Maybe it was Wiglaf).

But I digress, and mighty boringly, I fear. Naturally, as soon as I left the car, it started to drizzle again, and didn't let up for the three hours I was there. There's been a bit of trouble, apparently, with birders trampling on crops and deliberately flushing the bird from the field, but all those there last night behaved impeccably. Not that there seemed to be a bird to flush, to start with.

We spent ages scanning two fields - one ploughed and seeded, the other pasture being grazed by a herd of Friesians - for the rare vagrant (it's more often found in eastern and southern Europe, but a few overshoot to the UK each year) without any luck. Ditto the various trees, pylons, fenceposts and sheds. At one point, a small falcon began approaching from the north, but even before our hopes were really raised, it became obvious it was a Hobby.

Just at the point when I was thinking of packing up for home, because the increasingly heavy rain would be deterring the bird's insect prey, we realised that it was sat on a fencepost on the far side of the field, clearly having just flown in from some concealed spot. Skirting the edge of the field, we approached to well within 50 yards, but it seemed entirely unconcerned, using the fence as a hunting perch and continually swooping onto insects in the ploughed earth. It didn't do any more flying than that, which I suppose might have been a disappointment if it hadn't been such a handsome bird anyway, but we watched for up to an hour as it fed well.

And that was that. Great bird to restart my patch list with, and ironically far better views of it than the one I saw in Spain last week. Well worth a soaking (exacerbated by a leaking wellie).

Steppe-ing out

Just back from a week in Aragon on a 'fam' trip - birding, eating too much, and drinking lots of splendid wine. I won't even attempt to call it work, because it really was a lot of fun with a great group of people.

One of the things that really struck me was just how huge and empty the landscape is - it's something that takes you completely by surprise in western Europe. Given that around half of Aragon's 1.2 million population lives in the capital, Zaragoza, that probably shouldn't be a shock, but it is. Standing out on the steppes (above left), you can imagine yourself in the middle of the American South West.

Highlights included seeing several glorious Lammergeiers, a Golden Eagle on the nest feeding young, more Griffon Vultures than I could even have imagined, a very showy Rock Thrush in the spectacular setting of Castillo Loarre, a displaying Little Bustard out on the steppes, the maddeningly elusive Dupont's Larks, and both Black and Black-eared Wheatears (one of the latter subjecting a male Cuckoo to the most fierce mobbing I've ever seen from a small bird). And then there were Bee-eaters and Hoopoes galore, Alpine Swifts chattering overhead, and a whole host of great warblers, including Subalpine, Dartford, Sardinian, the not-very-aptly named Melodious, and the lovely Bonelli's (basically the southern equivalent of our Wood Warbler).

I shouldn't forget the Nightingales. Other than on the steppes, they were everywhere we went, and when we stayed a couple of nights in the mountaintop village of Alquezar (pictured right), you could hear them singing throughout the night (luckily, we were far too shattered to be kept awake by it). In fact, the local name for them is Ruisenor, meaning 'noisy man', which hits the nail right on the head.

I had intended to do a lot of reading, but spent most of my travelling time sleeping, so I still have quite a bit to catch up on. But anyway, here's a picture of our tired but happy group to close with...

PS. As you'll see, the rain in Spain doesn't fall mainly on the plain at all.

HappenStance at the Troubadour

On Monday, May 26th, HappenStance poets will be reading at the Troubadour in London. The line-up (in no particular order) will be:

Martin Cook
Tom Duddy
Eleanor Livingstone
Greg Leadbetter
Rob A. Mackenzie
Michael Mackmin
Helena Nelson
Andrew Philip
DA Prince

It’s a great venue, and more importantly, a terrific and very varied line-up. All are fine poets, and if you’re a regular visitor to this blog you’ll know that over the last three or four years I’ve enjoyed HappenStance chapbooks by all of them (except Helena, who is of course HappenStance’s guiding light – her own collection, Starlight On Water, is from Rialto, and is also highly recommended).

Oh, and except DA Prince, who as I mentioned last week, has just had her book Nearly The Happy Hour released as HappenStance’s first full-size poetry collection. She’s another who’s well worth hearing. I read with her last year at a Poetry Nottingham event, and she has an understated but often quietly mesmeric style.

So, if you’re anywhere near London that day, go along. It’s not often you get that much talent on the same bill, for a mere £5. Doors open at 8pm.

REVIEW: The Peregrine, by JA Baker

The Peregrine
JA Baker

Every now and then, you come across a discussion online, or in a poetry mag, about exactly what constitutes that apparent contradiction in terms, the prose poem.

I usually stay well outside the debate, being far too confused about the whole concept to add anything useful to it, and have always been content to tell myself that I know one when I see one.

Well this book is most definitely one, all 190-odd pages of it. Written by a retired librarian (and, in fact, rewritten five times before publication in 1967), it’s absolutely one of a kind. The author spent 10 years closely observing the Peregrines that wintered on the estuaries near his Essex home, and the result is something quite unlike any other book on nature I’ve ever come across.

The writing goes way beyond mere description, and steers clear of awe-struck wonder, anthropomorphism or sentimentality. Instead it borders on the truly metaphysical, and succeeds in painting a ‘real’ picture of these birds. Nature is cruel and unforgiving, but there’s a real sense of it as a single vast organism, each part of it wholly (but often invisibly) dependent on everything else. And so there’s a real, ahead-of-its-time ‘green’ message there, although there’s never any attempt to lecture or even spell it out explicitly.

It’s structured as a diary of a few months, and quite apart from the bird descriptions, it’s a superb evocation of a hard British winter (remember them?), with the whole of the countryside constantly transformed between liquid and solid states.

There’s loads of superb material in there about behaviour, too, which adds hugely to the sort of thing you get in fieldguides. They would tell you that Peregrines hunt other birds using their famous ultra-high speed stoop, but this shows the sheer range of prey they take, including plenty of ground mammals, as well as the range of hunting methods used. It’s the sort of thing that, as a birder, you see sometimes out in the field, but that makes you doubt yourself because it’s so far away from what the books say.

There is occasional genuine drama (the moment in the barn towards the end, for example), but generally it just slowly builds tension towards a climax that you don’t really see coming but that never overstates its case. Masterpiece is an overused word, but here it is wholly justified.

Whatever happened to The Rockingbirds?

My post about Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers a couple of weeks back sent me rummaging through my collection looking for his albums. While I was doing that, I came across the record that made me check his music out in the first place, The Rockingbirds’ eponymous 1992 debut.

Now country music from Camden might not sound too promising, and I guess it depends to a large extent on how you feel about country in general, but it’s a great record. It’s only a little bit ‘alt’, really, being much more straightforward, tuneful country-rock, owing a lot to Gram Parsons (and maybe Mike Nesmith) and coming drenched in lashings of pedal steel.

Track four on the album (which doesn’t seem to be available anymore) was Jonathan, Jonathan, a heartfelt and exuberant tribute to the great man (it even incorporated a Roadrunner-style ending), but there are plenty of other goodies on there. The opener, Gradually Learning, heads towards country-soul, there’s a good cover of John Hartford’s In Tall Buildings, and there’s at least two mid-tempo classics, Restless and Halfway To Comatose.

They did record a follow-up (which I haven’t got, unfortunately), but sadly faded away into obscurity. For a moment, though, they were briefly fashionable (even the NME liked them), and for once, it was for all the right reasons.

DA Prince book launch

A couple of weeks ago, Scottish chapbook press HappenStance published its first full-length poetry collection, DA Prince's Nearly The Happy Hour. I haven't got it yet, but this is a poet whose work appears in all sorts of poetry magazines on a very regular basis, and it's always high quality, so I will. I read with her in Nottingham last spring and she was compelling in a very understated way - that's the way her poems work, too, so treat yourself.

HappenStance goes from strength to strength, and hopefully there'll be more full-length collections in the future to complement the growing and ever more varied range of chapbooks.

Snyder at 78

I just came across this piece in The Guardian, about the beat poet Gary Snyder, who has just won this year's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

I only really came across his work four years ago, when I went across to California to a friend's wedding. The town near which it took place, Davis, has a campus of the University of California, and the branch of Borders there was full of Snyder's books, I think because he had been (perhaps still is?) a lecturer there. Anyway, I liked them, and bought a couple. The new and selected, No Nature, is a pretty good introduction to his work, and although I'd probably agree with some of the comments on the article, that his earlier work is more rewarding than a lot of the later stuff, there are gems from all periods to pick out. It's quite unlike the work of the other beats, being heavily indebted to Far Eastern poetry, mythology and religion, but I think I like it more than any of them, except perhaps Gregory Corso.

Anyway, good piece - I'm going to dig out some Snyder books when I get home tonight.

Poets in person 2

Last week I mentioned the very positive review that In Person: 30 Poets got at Stride Magazine. At the weekend, Frances Leviston gave it a similar thumbs-up in The Guardian. Looks like an absolute must to me - I'll have a look to see if Borders have it when I'm in Leicester tomorrow.

Latest review

I was surprised and more than a little delighted to come across Rob Mackenzie's review of Troy Town on his blog, Surroundings, this morning.

As I've already mentioned in the comments there, the thing that was most thrilling about it was that Rob has put his finger on a number of things about the poems, both good and bad, that I'd been groping blindly towards myself without really being able to articulate them, to myself, let alone others! I reckon that's pretty much what a review should do, among other things. Have a read yourselves...

Poets in person

Not much to add to this review, except to say that I agree - it's good to see something like this from a major poetry publisher like Bloodaxe (very reasonable price, too), and I suspect quite a lot of other publishers will be wondering why they didn't do it before now.

Anyway, great idea, great review, and I'm off to order a copy now.

Radio on!

Also in the Guardian review was this article on Jonathan Richman, or more specifically the first Modern Lovers album, a long-time favourite of mine.

I'm not entirely sure I get all the points being made about the relationship between Boston and New York (and the rest of the USA) in the feature, but it's an interesting read anyway.

Richman's later albums tend to divide opinion pretty starkly, although I'd argue that there are plenty of little gems on them too*, among all the nursery rhyme soundalikes, not least on the splendid Jonathan Goes Country**.

But whatever, The Modern Lovers is a bona fide classic, fully justifying its reputation as a missing link between the Velvet Underground and punk.

* That Summer Feeling - I rest my case.
** Since She Started To Ride is great, but it's all excellent.

Silver Jews

I had plenty of time to read over a long Bank Holiday weekend, and as well as catching up on a lot of poetry (and reading The Great Gatsby for the umpteenth time), I made my customary trawl through the weekend reviews.

Saturday's Guardian had this preview (scroll down to the bottom) of forthcoming gigs from Silver Jews, a band who started off as something of a Pavement side project (or more properly, I think the two bands developed side by side). Anyway, main man David Berman is also a poet, and last year I read and enjoyed his collection, Actual Air. Not sure whether he has anything more in the literary pipeline, but either way, I recommend both his records and his books.

Whatever happened to...

Saturday’s Guardian contained this review of a new collection by Stephen Romer, which was slightly strange, as just a few weeks back I’d been wondering what became of him, having liked some of his work back in the early 90s (I remember it as being a bit Hugo Williams-ish, but maybe my memory is playing tricks) but come across precious little since.

Of course, just because a poet is taking his time between collections doesn’t mean he isn’t busy, and Romer’s French connection has always been a strong one. Living on the other side of the Channel for more than 25 years pretty much ensures that your poetic profile in this country is lowered somewhat, I’d guess.

It set me thinking about another “where is he now?” A while ago on this blog, I mentioned having bought three of Oliver Reynolds’ four collections in secondhand shops, and having enjoyed them all (the fact he often writes about Cardiff helps, because I lived there for a few years. In fact, he deserves an award for getting the placename Splott into a poem - I'd guess Peter Finch might also have managed it sometime, but probably no one else. I recently also bought what I think is his most recent book, Almost, but even that is eight or nine years old. I think he has also worked extensively in theatre, but he seems to be a very low-profile poet, which is perhaps a little strange given that his first two books seemed to draw an awful lot of critical plaudits.

So, I'd be interested to know, what does anyone else think of his work? Any ideas what he's doing now? He doesn't seem to me to fit very comfortably into any particular 'school', or into any stereotype of Welsh contemporary poetry, so is that one reason why he's not so visible? I'd love to know more...