John Ash: Selected Poems

Following on from last week's post about the death of John Ash, I've been reading through his Selected Poems, from Carcanet. It's consistently excellent, but my favourite poems there are generally from his 1991 collection, The Burnt Pages. He's great at creating an air of disquiet from seemingly vague and disparate details (something I seem to remember from the poem Visigothic, that I mentioned in that previous post), and history and the present day are in constant conversation with each other.

A particular favourite is Smoke, which starts:

"It was late in the year
and forests were burning a long way off
the day the smoke arrived, almost unperceived"

before ending with the wonderful:

"But don't vanish, don't take the path to the river.
It is cold there and lonely,
and the sky is a burnt page. Stay –

you and you others. If we are not to become
a dispersed people of smoke
the monument that is us must be built soon."

John Ash, 1948-2019

Very sad to read this morning of the death of John Ash, a very fine poet who somehow often seemed to slip below the radar of surveys of contemporary UK poetry (perhaps because he had lived and worked abroad for so long).

I first came across his work in a Bloodaxe anthology in the early 2000s. One poem, Visigothic, caught my eye more because of my interest in early medieval history than anything else, but its quality got me hooked, I read the rest of Ash's poems in there (maybe half a dozen), and he became one of my favourite poets, one of those names who you really want the rest of the poetry-reading world to know about, but who you also regard as your own secret.

Carcanet have what I think is his last published poem here – typically of him, it's elegant and witty on the surface, with a very serious centre. He'll be very much missed.

Skies, by Alison Brackenbury

This rather splendid book arrived in the post yesterday – Alison Brackenbury's latest collection, Skies, from Carcanet. You can read a lot more about it here, but suffice it to say that the poems I've already read from it are terrific.

Jazz and Poetry

Last night I was lucky enough to be one of the invited readers at the first session of the new season of Jazz and Poetry, at The Guitar Bar, Nottingham.

It's a well established night, which combines poetry with superb music from Four In A Bar, a trad jazz quartet that includes poet and publisher John Lucas. It's run by novelist David Belbin (who has also, for many years, been reviewing theatre, comedy and particularly music here with unfailing open-mindedness) and poet Pippa Hennessy, of Nottingham Writers' Studio.

Pippa read in the first section, along with open mic-ers Russell and Tony (whose full names sadly escaped me), and all were excellent. Russell was brave enough to read with backing from the band's guitarist, and it worked well, but all three had me wanting to hear more.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It's a really good space, with excellent acoustics and a lot of character, and the audience were more than kind. It was only the second full-length reading I've done from The Elephant Tests, so I'm still sorting out what works and what doesn't, but it's got me looking forward to the other readings I've got coming up in the next two months.

Sarah Jackson's debut collection Pelt, from Bloodaxe, won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and very deservedly so too. I've read it with great enjoyment, and I suppose I thought I knew it quite well, so it was a surprise to find myself noticing new pleasures as she read. But that, I think, is what a good reading should do, and it will certainly send me back to the book again. Incidentally, her pamphlet Milk, from Pighog, was also excellent, and a really beautifully produced publication too.

There was time to make new acquaintances and catch up with old faces like Alan Baker and Kerry Featherstone, although I unfortunately managed to miss Rory Waterman. But no matter, as Rory's launching his own debut Carcanet collection at the bar on November 27th, when Roy Marshall will also be launching his Shoestring Press debut The Sun Bathers, and before that on November 13th the next Jazz and Poetry will feature Gregory Woods and another guest TBC.

As if all that's not enough, there's a good selection of real ale on tap, plus bottled beers including a particular old favourite of mine, Sierra Nevada (I only noticed it too late, but I'll put that right next time). There you go - even more reasons to be at the next event.

The uninvited guest

You know an open mic night is beginning to make a name for itself when Ezra Pound makes an unscheduled appearance, and refuses to sit down.

The father of modernist poetry/great man/mad old fascist, as he was variously described by readers (and the three are, of course, not mutually exclusive), first cropped up in Robert Richardson’s open mic slot at last night’s Shindig in Leicester (he read three short poems by Pound). And, as seems to be the way with these nights, and with all good open mic nights for that matter, other readers responded by reading his work too, or by reading work informed by or influenced by Pound.

Such themes and tropes have a habit of turning up, as Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press pointed out, but uninvited or not, they’re ultimately welcome, giving the evening something to coalesce around, or work against, on occasion.

Some of my highlights among last night’s open mic-ers included Charles Lauder Jr’s poem The Rocking Chair Thief (think that’s the right title), Kerry Featherstone’s two pieces, Gary Carr (incidentally, here’s the terrific poem he read at the last Shindig) and Graham Norman’s short, taut poems themed around the canonical hours, but in truth there was barely a dud note all night.

The same was true of the featured readers. I’ve blogged previously about Angela France and Daniel Sluman, who made up the Nine Arches half of the bill – both are fine poets who also read well. Angela’s newer work (due to appear in a book from Nine Arches early next year) is intriguingly different from her earlier pamphlet and collection – much more personal and direct. I particularly liked the piece she read about family superstitions.

Daniel read, as ever, with great poise. There’s a contrast between the often difficult subject matter of his poems (the loss of a leg to cancer, troubled relationships, and last night, abuse) and the relaxed and witty introductions that works well, but he’s not a poet to settle for the easy laugh. I could say a lot more, but I want to keep my powder dry for the review of his book that I’ll post soon, especially as two of the poems he read last night are two that I focus on.

In the second half, Sarah Jackson read well from her Bloodaxe collection Pelt. I heard her read in Nottingham a couple of years back, but the newer work was the highlight for me.

Rory Waterman closed the night, with poems from his debut collection from Carcanet (due around this time next year). I knew some of them already, having seen his work in Carcanet’s New Poetries V, but there was an awful lot to enjoy right across the board – the creeping sense of menace in his American-set poem was great. I think it was probably a more rounded selection of his work than appears in New Poetries V, good as that is, and it augured well for that collection next year. 

Billy Letford's Bevel, out now

I heard William Letford read at StAnza a year last March, and I've been looking forward to his first collection from Carcanet since then. Well, the wait is over – Bevel is out now.

Most of the articles I've seen about him since then, whether in literary journals or the more general press, have made much of his day-job as a roofer. That's fair enough - I'd be willing to bet it's been a good long while since there's been another poet/roofer, it's something that clearly informs his poetry much of the time, and if it helps draw a bit more attention to his work, then that's great.

I hope, though, that it doesn't become the only way he's defined, because he's just a very talented writer and performer, full stop. Buy the book and you'll see what I mean.

Catching up

I've been out of circulation for a few days, so I'm just going over a few things I missed, and that you might have, too.

Monday night's Shindig at The Western, in Leicester, featured the launch of C J Allen's new Nine Arches Press collection, At The Oblivion Tea-Rooms. There's a sample poem from it here at Litterbug (and the New and Selected from Leafe Press that's mentioned there comes highly recommended, too).

Meanwhile, at the HappenStance blog, Helena Nelson has some very interesting things to say about selling books through Amazon. I try to buy direct from presses where I can, or at readings, but I have taken the lazy way out at times.

Finally, my review of Carcanet's An Andrew Crozier Reader is at the Magma blog now - it's a book I reccomend highly.

Enchantment, by David Morley

Carcanet, 2010, £9.95

Recent years have seen David Morley mining a rich seam of inspiration from his Romany background – the results, in terms of both quality and quantity, have been enough to make any poet envious. This latest volume shows no sign of a drop-off in either department.

Enchantment does exactly what it says on the cover, fully living up to every sense of that word. In the modern sense, it draws the reader in immediately, delights and intrigues, and doesn’t stop doing so until you put it down.

To do so it draws heavily on worlds of myth and magic (as in the Latin incantare), and most importantly, it sings (cantare). The straightforward simplicity of the title is reflected in poetry that’s serious, ambitious and challenging, but never wilfully obscure.

Its early poems celebrate both friendship and the natural world, and as you’d expect from an ecologist, Morley has a sharp eye and a knack for exact, economical phrasing to conjure it up for the reader.

He also has a gift for evoking nature in a far more impressionistic way, though. In Chorus, a favourite at recent readings, there’s a sparrow sorting “spare parts on a pavement” for every turnstone doing “precisely what is asked of them by name”.

Enjoyable as they are, though, these poems are merely the warm-up before the main event, the “lit circle” in which Romany myths and circus stories are unfolded in sparkling, shimmering language.

This section contains the highlights of the collection, for me. There’s Hedgehurst, telling the story of a half-human, half-hedgehog creator-king, The Circling Game, in which a blacksmith creates a girl from fire, and Spinning, which considers the whole process of story-telling and translation of experience into words, bristling with lines such as:

What’s fabulous might be a hedgehog spiny with rhyme

or a bride born from gnarled nouns. What’s fabulous might be

darkness drowsing over a woman of words beside a waterfall

of words. What’s fabulous might be an anvil hammered white-hot

with hurt, or Lippizans held or hurtling on the harness of a verb.

Now while the Romany background is much in evidence, for me these pieces also recalled Anglo-Saxon poetry and (appropriately enough for the Midlands-based Morley) the Gawain poet in their heavy use of alliteration and their physicality. That’s a difficult knack to pull off – however much I like it, I’ll admit that in some Anglo-Saxon poetry, the metre makes it very difficult for the language to really take flight – so all the more credit to Morley for keeping his lines so supple. Passages such as this, from The Circling Game, beg to be read aloud for the sheer pleasure of the sound:

The masters stank of rancid bank-notes. Their palms were plumy.

Their palms were planed purple with done deals and sure things.

John played a circling game with the horse masters, sending

himself off when wanted most, shying on the end of a lunge line

of their flattery, letting himself be talked back to the fair with a drink

before coming back and laying out the tackle and terms of his trade.

It adds up to an intoxicating brew, and I’ll go back to that word ‘fabulous’ that’s so  crucial to the passage quoted from Spinning. As with his collection’s title, Morley’s good at getting you to consider a word’s whole lineage – he takes you back to an older meaning while keeping all its current connotations alive.

I’ll be surprised, and disappointed, if this book doesn’t end up in the running for one of the big awards this year, but regardless of whether or not it does, it’s a superb piece of work. Read it.

Just released

Today's poem on Lesley Duncan's blog at The Herald is by Alison Brackenbury. Coincidentally, when I got home late last night, my copy of Alison's new book, Singing In The Dark, had arrived from Carcanet. I only had time to flick it open and read a couple of poems, but it looks excellent, so I'll be getting into it over the weekend.

Poetry Daily

I was pointed in the direction of the excellent Poetry Daily by Alison Brackenbury – it features a lot of US poets, in particular, and it’s always well worth a look.

A poem from Alison’s forthcoming new book, Singing In The Dark, will be Poem of the Day on the site on February 18, and she’s got another, 6.25, appearing in this Saturday’s Guardian Review. I've just pre-ordered the book from Carcanet - I can't think of anyone better at mixing traditional form with very modern concerns.