Maps and Legends

This is out from Nine Arches Press next week, just in time for Christmas. It's an anthology celebrating five years of Nine Arches, and is edited by Jo Bell, featuring poetry from Claire Crowther, David Morley, Luke Kennard, Maria Taylor, Angela France, Daniel Sluman, Alistair Noon, Tom Chivers, David Hart, Roz Goddard, Phil Brown, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Ruth Larbey and myself.

The anthology will be launched with a reading next Wednesday, December 11th, from 7.15-9pm, at Room 101, Library of Birmingham. Tickets are £6 / £4.

Seamus Heaney R.I.P.

I'm not sure that I can add anything at all useful to what has already been written about the sad death of Seamus Heaney at the age of 74. There's a really fine piece by poet and publisher Tom Chivers over at the Guardian's Comment Is Free site that really says it all.

I studied Heaney at A Level, back in the late 80s, along with Eliot and Larkin. I liked his work a lot, but didn't care much for the latter two at the time (my opinion of them has changed somewhat since). But Heaney has remained a favourite. His version of Beowulf is my favourite translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, and recent collections always had plenty to commend them.

He's one of those artists, I think - it happens with musicians as much as with writers - who eventually suffers something of a backlash not because of the quality of his own work, but because of that of his poorer imitators. With Heaney, fortunately, that reaction's never been too vicious, in large part I suspect because he was such an approachable, generous figure.

In 1995, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I was working at my local newspaper. The father of a childhood friend rang up, told me that Seamus Heaney was his wife's cousin (I wish I'd known earlier), and asked if I'd like a quick word with him about the prize win. And so I did a phone interview with the great man. I don't think a lot got published in the end, but he chatted openly and in the friendliest manner possible.

I know what I'll be reading this weekend.

Poetry and plagiarism update

The whole Christian Ward furore has been rumbling on for the last few days - he has now made an apology, of sorts, but it's far from being full or uniequivocal, and his use of the phrase "ended up submitting a draft that wasn't entirely my own work" is understatement on a massive scale. I think he's probably only made things worse for himself, because his statement reads like the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from a politician, or the press office of a corporation caught pumping toxic waste onto a crowded tourist beach.

Tom Chivers has some very interesting things to say about it here, and I find myself agreeing with much of his post. But I still keep coming back to two things - surely if you're going to work with someone else's text (and I've read plenty of poetry that does that successfully), it's common courtesy to (i) credit the original source, and (ii) inform the original author of what you're doing. Even if you take Christian Ward's statement at face value, he failed to do that.

Some more reading

Truly excellent reviews by Phil Brown (presumably not the Hull City manager) of Luke Kennard and Tom Chivers, over at Stride.

I've got the Chivers collection, but not started it yet, and have already blogged about his Nine Arches pamphlet. I'll catch up with the Kennard book soon, too - his last was wonderful. But anyway, the reviews are, in themselves, a pleasure to read.

The Terrors - Tom Chivers

London poet Tom Chivers has a new chapbook – The Terrors – published by Nine Arches Press this week.

It takes as its starting point the Newgate Calendar (which itself appeared partly in chapbook form, appropriately enough), with Chivers writing emails to some of the mad, bad and downright unlucky who ended up in the infamous London prison in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

He handles the obvious anachronism well, using the email device not as a gimmick, but to move rapidly back and forth between past and present and allow the reader to make up their own mind about the similarities between our own society and the one of 200 years ago. It’s very much a case of showing rather than telling, and it’s very effective.

That’s not to say that this is stodgy social comment, though. A real pleasure is the fact that the poems allow you, as you read, plenty of space to create your own back stories to the characters within (sometimes a mere name is enough to spark if off). For all my enjoyment of the history, it’s this aspect that’s the most appealing part of the work, I think, requiring as it does imagination on the part of both poet and reader.

The emails take the form of prose poems (without getting into that old debate about what a prose poem is). Another of the things I enjoyed most was the tension between the compressed, shorthand form of the typical email, and the poet’s instinct to wax lyrical. It results in a sense of language only just being kept under control (and at times it glimpses freedom and explodes into all sorts of unexpected allusions and associations). That tension, of course, mirrors the knife edge on which the gaol’s inmates are treading.

I've said before that I'm a sucker for most poetry/history crossovers, but this is one of the more successful I've come across, not least because Tom Chivers never loses sight of the fact that he's a poet. If he can win over a Londonphobe like me, what are you waiting for?

There's a launch reading for the book this Sunday - full details here.