HappenStance Border raid

From left: Myself, James Wood, Eleanor Livingstone, Trish Ace, Rob Mackenzie, Helena Nelson.

On Friday, I hot-footed it north to Carlisle for a reading, alongside five other HappenStance poets, as part of the Border Poets series.
I usually like to see a bit of the countryside on such jaunts, but it rained all the way up to Scotch Corner, and across the Stainmore Pass to Penrith, putting paid to my plan to do a bit of birding and stop off at the spot where semi-legendary Viking king of York Eric Bloodaxe (see the poetry connection?) was finally brought to bay.
We had one or two problems finding each other once we got there (and two or three excellent pints of Black Sheep), but were at the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in good time to appreciate what really is a lovely venue. And what followed was without doubt the best reading I’ve been involved with.
There was a good-sized audience, who were appreciative, knowledgeable and gratifyingly willing to part with their money for chapbooks (we were pretty much sold out by the end of the night). The variety of poets on show seemed to work particularly well, offering plenty of light and shade and both obvious and more subtle similarities (three of us, quite unintentionally, read poems with Robinson Crusoe connections).
Eleanor Livingstone, who launched her chapbook at the same event as me two years ago, read well from her excellent The Last King Of Fife. The title poem, in particular, is a favourite of mine, but she’s a very sure-footed poet, in an understated way, so there was plenty else to enjoy.
I’d only just met James Wood, but have been enjoying his The Theory Of Everything since it came out. He reads very well, with an engagingly animated manner, and his technical mastery and breadth of knowledge are worn lightly, both drawing the reader in and allowing him to surprise them when things take a darker turn.
Trish Ace was also a new face to me, but again I’ve been enjoying her book, First Blood, for months. We talked a little beforehand about attitudes to putting the domestic and everyday into poems, and Trish mentioned that perhaps the prevailing climate is against this, but her reading rather reinforced my view, that when it’s done well, as here, what is there to complain about? She makes connections between the personal and the wider world without signposting them or straining for significance, she distils emotion well, and she's another excellent reader.
Rob Mackenzie is another who manages to be animated without ever getting theatrical. It’s a style that suits his poems down to the ground, too, because he constantly springs surprises on you (in both style and subject matter) without ever reaching for easy, look-at-me effects. He read Concentration, one of my favourites from his chapbook The Clown Of Natural Sorrow, and his genuinely creepy At The Harry Potter Launch drew audible gasps from the audience.
For my part, I read five from Making The Most Of The Light, plus one from Winter Gifts, and a new-ish poem. The full set-list was:
1. Familiar
2. Man Overboard
3. Vocabulary
4. Poem
5. Redwings
6. At Home
7. Cure
In between times, HappenStance’s founder and all-round creative dynamo Helena Nelson read poems and talked about the experience of starting a chapbook press from scratch. I think every one of us would say we owe a great debt to her, not only for taking a punt on putting out our books, but also for her hugely supportive and instructive editing of said pamphlets.
We all told the audience a bit about our current activities and plans (more on mine tomorrow), and afterwards chatted with them while books were bought, drinks seen off, etc. If any of them are reading this, thank you too for making it an enjoyable and inspiring night.
I meandered back, via a secondhand bookshop in Penrith (£7 for two books, on 14th century poetry and medieval history), and RSPB Leighton Moss, where the wind was keeping the Bitterns and Bearded Tits deep in the reedbeds, but a very showy Great White Egret gave great views.

Brittle Star

I had a poem, Treaty House, accepted for issue 19 of Brittle Star yesterday, in what's been a big week for me. I've got a couple of major developments to report, but they'll have to wait until the weekend. In the meantime, it's full steam ahead practicing for Friday's reading (I know my name's not there, but I will be there, honest). I've been reading loudly to the living room for the last week. The response has been somewhat muted.

Essential Hitchcock

Last Saturday, The Guardian contained a pull-out supplement with Part 1 of their 1000 Albums To Hear Before You Die. Of course, I didn’t read the introduction properly, so didn’t bother to buy the paper during the week to collect the subsequent parts, thinking that they were going to be published on consecutive Saturdays. Stupid, I know.
So, I have no idea whether Robyn Hitchcock’s classics I Often Dream Of Trains or Eye made it in there. I do know, though, that you can get both, plus his first solo album, Black Snake Diamond Role, and a host of bonus demo tracks, in a new boxed set called I Wanna Go Backwards. You wouldn’t be disappointed.
I like a lot of Hitchcock’s albums with The Egyptians, but those first two I mentioned, I Often Dream Of Trains and Eye, are on another level. Both feature nothing more than his (often multi-tracked) voice, plus his own acoustic guitar and piano accompaniment. On Eye, in particular, his finger-picking is stunning, mixing folkiness with a peculiarly English psychedelic flavour. Both albums, I should add, are very immediate, catchy even, and although the influences of Syd Barrett, John Lennon and Bob Dylan are always apparent, they’re never overpowering, Hitchcock being too much his own man to let that happen.
A lot of the time that’s down to the lyrics. Admittedly, sometimes Robyn gets a bit self-consciously weird and tries a bit too hard, but most of the time he sets out a highly individual vision that’s often unsettling, often funny, occasionally heartbreaking (especially the very Dylanesque Linctus House, on Eye) and always thought-provoking.
Another album that might have made it in there is Graham Parker and The Rumour's Squeezing Out Sparks. I bought it on CD the other day, having long ago lost my old tape of it, and it still stands up well. Parker got sick, in the late 70s, of being tagged as an angry young man along with Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, but you can see (or hear, rather) why it happened. He sounds like a man with a lot to get off his chest, and on this album, the musical backing is stripped back to a pretty raw, guitar-heavy sound. There are one or two weak tracks, but Discovering Japan, Passion Is No Ordinary Word and Local Girls hit the spot, and You Can’t Be Too Strong almost qualifies as sensitive. There are two bonus tracks, with his old brass section back on board, one a fairly straight but decent stab at the Jackson 5’s I Want You Back, and the other called Mercury Poisoning, a bile-filled but upbeat kiss-off to his old reord company.
He never quite hit the commercial heights that Costello and Jackson did, but arguably he stayed truer to his original vision.

Grail birds

Last Monday, we (myself, editor Kevin Wilmot, deputy editor Mike Weedon and photographer Tom Bailey) spent the day putting together a feature for the January issue of Bird Watching, involving what’s known as the Big Sit. You’re not allowed to move from within a smallish circle (17 ft diameter, I think), and you see how many bird species you can spot in a set length of time. We tried it at three different locations, for an hour at each.
Some of the results were surprising (only two Grey Herons, no Collared Doves, no House Sparrows), and it certainly makes you approach your birding in a different way, putting a high emphasis on birdsong, for starters. We thought we did pretty well – 54 species in an hour at Eldernell, out on the Nene Washes; 40 at Woodwalton Fen Nature Reserve; and 43 at Ferry Meadows Country Park, on the outskirts of Peterborough.
The highlight, for me at least, came at Woodwalton, when a Bittern dropped into the reeds on the far side of the pool we were watching. It’s one of those grail birds for me – I’m sure I could have seen one before now by going to Minsmere or somewhere similar, but I always thought I’d rather see one in the course of my normal birding. They’re still very rare in the UK (and the dreadful summer we just had, plus the more recent floods, will have done nothing to help that), but when you finally do see one, they’re well worth the wait.
Over the last two days, I’ve been birding around the local patch. Yesterday there was a nice little group of Goosanders at Watermead Park, and a spectacular, noisy flock of around 10,000 Starlings at Cossington Meadows. Today, I dithered over whether to go out, and where to go, and finally dodged heavy showers to drop into Kelham Bridge, a small local reserve (it’s a former sewage works). I’d been there for 15 minutes, with nothing to see but a few Moorhens and Mallards, when a male Hen Harrier appeared and started quartering the reedbeds and grassland. They’re hugely impressive and utterly distinctive silver-grey birds, and I was able to watch it for about a quarter of an hour before it disappeared over the hill, although hopefully it might hang around for a few days.
But to get to the point, finally. That type of sighting is what makes me enjoy birding, because afterwards it always strikes you as a massive stroke of luck. One bird, making its way across the country, and a tiny window of opportunity to see it passing through your area. If I’d, say, stopped at the garage before birding, instead of after, I might have missed it. I might have not bothered at all, what with all that rain around. I might have been looking the other way as it made its entrance, and have remained in blissful ignorance as it floated around behind the hide.
Of course, if you’re a glass-half-empty type of birder, you probably spend your time thinking of all the birds you didn’t quite see, but that way lies madness.

HappenStance reading

A week on Friday, November 30, I'll be reading with five fellow HappenStance poets at Tullie House, Carlisle.
The event is one of a series run by Border Poets, and will feature Helena Nelson, Patricia Ace, Eleanor Livingstone, Rob Mackenzie and James Wood, as well as yours truly. If you live locally, or you're in the area, come along to listen and say hello.
Quite apart from what should be a very enjoyable evening of poetry, a chance to meet old friends and make new ones, I'm looking forward to seeing a part of the country I've never really been to before (I might have passed through, just the once). And there's all those prime wetland birding sites all the way up the west coast that I'll just have to pop into on the way there or back.

Hwaet?

I didn't have very high hopes for the new film version of Beowulf, and this review pretty much confirms my fears. Not at all sure about those plot changes.

Fin again

My copy of Issue 1 of Fin, the Nottingham-based poetry mag I mentioned here, arrived yesterday.
First impressions are important, and it got off on the right foot with me by a) Looking compact and smartly-produced, rather like an American chapbook; and b) telling you exactly where it stands from the off. It does this with two statements, one of which reads "Fin is funded by subscribers and nobody else", and the other which states, rather unusually "One or two poems in each issue of Fin are likely to have been published before. We like the new stuff, but we think it's ridiculous to insist that a good poem only has one outing. All we'd ask is that you let us know when and where." I like that idea - more magazines should try it.
Anyway, inside are poems and nothing else, and the line-up of poets is a very impressive one. You've got the likes of Hugo Williams, Ian McMillan, Sheenagh Pugh, Mark Halliday, John Lucas, Mairead Byrne, Martin Stannard and CJ Allen, as well as plenty of other names you'll recognise from the small press world. There's also HappenStance poet Gill McEvoy, whose poem Weather Forecasters was one of my favourites on first reading ( I liked CJ Allen's Poem a lot, too).
You can subscribe (£12 for four issues, £3.50 for one, cheques payable to Fin) by writing to Fin, PO Box 9207, Nottingham, NG14 7WP, England. I recommend it. Oh, and submissions go to the same address.

Boost your word power

OK, thanks to a recent post on Fretmarks, here's an incredibly simple, incredibly addictive game for whiling away your days. The beauty of it is, when your boss asks why you've spent the last eight hours playing it, you can scream back "I WAS TACKLING WORLD HUNGER!!!!!" with a clear conscience.
I think that description of it on Fretmarks - "a combination of tetris and crack cocaine" - hits the nail squarely on the head.

Special offer - FREE poetry book!

If anyone would like a free copy of Solitaire, the anthology of winners in this year's Templar Poetry pamphlet competition, get in touch (it'll have to be UK only, I'm afraid). I bought a copy at the Derwent Festival the other week, forgetting that one would be on the way because I entered the competition myself. It duly arrived yesterday, so it might as well go to a good home.
First come, first served - drop me an email with your address, and I'll post it out.

Best of the blogs

Too snowed under at work and too bone idle in my lunch hour to actually write anything of interest myself (too busy watching flocks of Fieldfares getting blown past the window, too), so here's my pick of the morning's browsing.
Rob Mackenzie set me thinking with his piece on poetry reviews, while
George Szirtes raises a few of the questions that occurred to me on hearing the Today programme item he mentions. Happy reading.

Out now

The tenth anniversary issue (No.40) of Obsessed With Pipework arrived yesterday. There's a load of good stuff, with an international flavour, especially three poems by Noosa Lee which I've read and re-read several times. Noosa is behind the blog That's So Pants, which is always an entertaining read.
I've got three poems in OWP too - Small Hours, First Night and Minding The Gaps.

He's at it again

More drivel from Richard Ingrams in a recent column in The Independent. I can't find it online, so here's the text:
"When so many people regard the welfare of wildlife as more important than that of human beings. it isn't surprising that a massive police operation should be mounted following the killing of two hen harriers in Norfolk.
"There is now even a special arm of the police force, the National Wildlife Crime Unit, to crack down on such killings. The cost of maintaining it is enormous and the results in terms of prosecution negligible. In the hen harrier instance, the dead birds have not even been found. The investigation is an expensive charade.
"Behind all this lies the almost fanatical crusade to foster the introduction of birds of prey into the countryside. And it has been a great success. There are now in Scotland growing numbers of huge sea eagles and in England, as I have previously noted, thousands of red kites, not to mention almost equal numbers of buzzards.
"The birds are all protected under EU legislation and have the vociferous support of organisations like the RSPB. There are parallel campaigns in the animal world to introduce wild boars and even wolves into the countryside.
"Gamekeepers are usually blamed for the killing of birds such as hen harriers which prey on grouse and partridges. But farmers have good reason to resent them when they can attack lambs and poultry. (The hen harrier I assume is so called because it harries hens, just as the sparrowhawk preys on sparrows.)
"But to the fanatics of the RSPB such complaints are irrelevant. The welfare of these savage birds, they say, must take precedence over that of farmers and their lambs, not to mention the many smaller birds which constitute their staple diet".
Five minutes of research is enough to show this up for the nonsense it is (I've ranted about this before), but it's still galling to read, knowing that it's not down to ignorance or befuddlement, but pure malice. He doesn't even try to deal in facts - where are the figures for this police investigation, for example. Half his column is baseless assumptions, and the rest is lies.
I'll say it again - introduction of birds of prey into the countryside? Most of the species he mentions are native species, previously reduced to dangerously low numbers by persecution from the likes of this halfwit. As for the "massive police operation" he mentions - well, a few phone calls by Norfolk Police before things are hushed up? Strange definition of "massive".
It's hardly surprising that he feels at liberty to talk such rubbish, though, when this sort of thing is going on. I'd bet my house that the whole thing would have been purused with a great deal more vigour had the shooters been two air rifle-toting hoodies from a housing estate. The RSPB should be ashamed of its passive acceptance of what's happened, too. Why aren't they demanding answers from the estate of their patron?

PS. Of course, you'd be justified in thinking that this is making a lot of fuss about something which, compared to the war in Iraq, for example, is small beer. But the fact that Ingrams has actually used his position to do a lot of good over the years makes his childish attitude on this (and even more questionable stance on things like anti-semitism and homosexuality) all the more reprehensible. He sees himself, I think, as a professional curmudgeon. You can make your own mind up as to whether listening to such a person is entertaining, but you can hear the same in any pub, any night, without paying extra for the privilege.

Braggy Blackstart

I spent most of last week lying on the sofa, coughing and sneezing and cursing the fact that I was ill during the one week of the year that there's no cricket on Sky. By the weekend, though, I finally felt a bit more normal, so ventured out to a gloriously autumnal Bradgate Park for a gentle stroll.
Now we in Leicestershire are justly proud of 'Braggy'. It's a wide expanse of bracken-covered moorland, dotted with granite outcrops, including the local landmark Old John (a hill topped by a distinctive folly). It was given to the people of the county early in the 20th century, having once been the home of the Greys (of Lady Jane Grey fame*). On a beautiful day, it's always busy with walkers, mountain bikers, picnicking families and so on, but it has to be said, it's not that great for wildlife, perhaps because there are so many people about. There are plenty of common birds, including Green Woodpeckers around the anthills, but not too many of the sort of species you might normally expect in such habitat (similar areas nearby, closed to the public, do much better). The Red Deer are always worth seeing, though, and there was one particularly magnificent male on view.
Anyway, I made my way along the paved path into the centre of the park, to the recently revamped tearooms, to see quite the most obliging rarity of the year. An immature male Black Redstart (see the pictures down the side) was busy catching insects on the roof of the tearooms, occasionally getting bullied by a Robin, but otherwise happily co-existing with the local Pied Wagtails. They're rare birds in the UK (although very common in Central Europe), but he seemed to have decided that the shallow slope of the tearooms made an acceptable alternative to a scree-covered mountainside. I expect the outcrops are much to his liking, too. I did very briefly see one on migration close to my home earlier in the year, but these were much better views, in much better light. It more than made up for a couple of very fallow birding weeks.
* I don't trust Wikipedia on this one. It says Lady Jane Grey was born in Bradgate House, now a fenced-off, peacock-haunted ruin in the middle of the park, but I was always told that she was born in the tiny manor house at Groby, a couple of miles away. And going off at a complete tangent, Groby (pronounced Grooby) crops up in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels. He often stayed at Coleorton Hall, near Ashby de la Zouch, and used two local sayings which he then used in the book. One was "there'll be many a dry eye in Groby Pool", said when someone unpopular died. The other was the fantastic "...and I'll thatch Groby Pool with pancakes", used as an expression of disbelief. Sadly, it's not clear whether either actually was used locally, but I'd like to think so.

So Here We Are 7

Here's the latest of Tears In The Fence editor David Caddy's Poetic Letters From England to download. It's something of a tribute to Bill Griffiths, who died recently. It's full of interesting material, so have a listen.
As always, you can read it at David's blog, if you'd prefer.

Mimesis 3

Issue 3 of the excellent Mimesis is out now - you can order it or download it from the website. You'll notice that it contains three poems by me - McNaught, Ramsons and Under Cotopaxi - but try not to let that put you off, because it's a magazine that offers a varied and impressive selection of poetry.

Festival time

Yesterday I went up to Matlock for the second day of the inaugural Derwent Poetry Festival. The weather cleared, and the drive up there is always a nice one, particularly with the woods looking very autumnal, so that got things off on the right foot. Nice venue too – Masson Mills at Cromford, one of the best-preserved of Richard Arkwright’s mills.
Perhaps not surprisingly for a new event, there weren’t too many exhibitors or visitors. But it has a lot of potential to grow, because the organisers, Templar Poetry, are building a fine reputation, and there’s definitely a gap for a decent literature event in the north Midlands.
First on were Mike Barlow and Derek Adams. Barlow has a new collection out, from Salt, following up a previous book with Smith / Doorstop, and was also the winner of this year’s National Poetry Competition. He’s one of those poets whose work you see in all sorts of small press mags, and it’s very rarely anything less than well-crafted. I was a little bit underwhelmed by the reading, though, but perhaps that was partly because I was so familiar with some of the poems – the element of surprise was gone.
Essex poet Derek Adams is another name you see in a lot of small-press mags – he was also BBC Wildlife Poet Of The Year, 2006. His poems, I’d have to say, worked the other way round. I enjoyed hearing him read them, particularly his fine tribute to Ian Dury, but I wasn’t so keen on them on the page afterwards.
Next was the excellent James Caruth (not to be confused with the equally excellent Jim Carruth). He lives in Sheffield, but was from Belfast originally. His poems are taut, well-honed affairs, and his strong Northern Ireland accent and slow, measured pace helped do them justice. So much so, in fact, that I immediately bought his book, A Stone’s Throw (Staple).
He was followed by Angela Cleland, a Scottish-born but London-based poet. Her reading style, particularly with her first few poems, was very physical, bordering on acting them out. I’ve no idea whether she comes from a performance poetry background, but I did find it a bit distracting. Don’t get me wrong – it was good to see such an animated reader, and my own readings could certainly do with an injection of energy, it’s just that at times, she seemed to have gone too far the other way. Because these really were fine poems, and she delivers them in a generally assured, engaging fashion. Her book, And In Here, The Menagerie, was my next buy. Like all the Templar chapbooks and full-size volumes, it’s extremely attractively produced.
I’d heard all sorts of good things about Rob Hindle's Some Histories Of The Sheffield Flood, 1864, all of them justified, as it turned out. With the aid of an assistant whose name I didn’t catch, he gave a reading that was dramatic without being gimmicky. The contrast between the bald facts of the tragedy, taken from official accounts, and the more human stories behind them, made for a real tension. And for all that it’s dealing with gritty social history, Hindle’s poetry is lyrical and, occasionally, heartbreaking. Another chapbook I had to buy.
Judy Brown was another entertaining reader. Her banter never gave too much away, and the poems ranged from playful to profound. I was running low on cash at this point, but I’ll send for her pamphlet, I think.
Finally, there was Simon Armitage, complete with sore throat. He read a fair few new poems (I mean, post-Tyrannosaurus Rex vs. the Corduroy Kid), most of which I enjoyed, and a couple of which rather washed over me. I think I enjoyed the extracts from his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight most – as he pointed out, it seemed appropriate to be reading it just a few miles away from its likely origin.
Finally, I also bought Jane Routh's Teach Yourself Mapmaking, a book I've been meaning to get for a while.
All things considered, then, a very enjoyable day - I can see this festival going from strength to strength. Support it if you get the chance.

I didn't see that coming!

I won’t spoil it for those of you who are yet to see the final episode of The Sopranos, but let’s just say that I’m not too sure what all the controversy was about. I thought the ending was totally in keeping with everything that had gone before – any other option would have meant writer and creator David Chase abandoning all the things that made it such a great series.
The way it was done was a total surprise, though, and the last five minutes made almost unbearably tense viewing. Now all we need is Channel 4 to start repeating it from the beginning...

Is anybody out there...

...going to the Derwent Poetry Festival at the weekend? It looks a decent line-up - I'm going up there on Sunday. If you do make it, say hello - I'll be the bloke quietly sobbing into the sports pages as I read the latest speculation on who's going to manage Leicester City next.

Cley revisited

It's always a bonus when work takes me over to Norfolk, and yesterday was no exception. We called in at Cley Marshes Reserve, run by Norfolk Wildlife Trust, to see what was around.
Down on the beach, it was predictably windy and cold, but the easterlies hadn't blown in any unusual European or Scandinavian migrants. A juvenile Gannet flashed past, and a Red-throated Diver, but otherwise it was just the gulls and, on the far side of the wonderfully ramshackle cafe, a field full of Brent Geese and a single Curlew. A flock of Golden Plovers shimmered overhead a couple of times, but we didn't stick it too long before the lure of the new visitor centre and a cheese and ham toastie grew too great.
It really is a great building, blended well into the low ridge on the far side of the coast road, and constructed to make as low an environmental impact as possible. The food, all locally sourced, is good too, but the best thing about it is that you can eat it while looking out over the marshes through huge windows. Marsh Harriers skimmed the reeds as we ate, and small groups of Black-tailed Godwits made their way inland (presumably to feed, although I've never seen that at Cley before).
Afterwards, we went to the main hide, to watch more harriers, plus a good assortment of wildfowl and waders, then on to Salthouse Marshes, where a little flock of eight Turnstones landed practically at our feet. They're always engaging, entertaining little birds, and after a quick bustle around, they departed to further down the shingle, calling as they went.
Cley is reputedly the most birdwatched parish in the UK, but once you're out on the shingle, looking back inland, you can't help noticing the three great wool churches of Blakeney, Cley and Salthouse (and there are more inland). They dominate the skyline, looking totally out of scale with their surroundings, a reminder of a time when Norfolk was both the most densely populated and the richest part of England. Now they look like ships, thrown up onto the land by a great storm, and stranded for good.

The Fourth Ingredient

You're not going to be surprised to hear that I love libraries, and can happily spend all day in even the smallest and most scantily stocked. One of my favourites was Canton Library in Cardiff. I only used it for a few months, just after I moved to South Wales in 1996, before it was burned down, but it was a nice old building, with a good collection for a small suburban branch library.
The piece below, by my old friend Mark Howard Jones, is about another South Wales library. I don't suppose you'd see its like these days, unfortunately.


Metal, wood and paper. Those were the only ingredients. Or, at least, the only physical ingredients. The only visible ones. But there was a fourth, hidden and invisible.
Old wooden shelves lining the walls, alongside newer metal ones standing free; all holding up masses of heavy paper, bound into books.
And not even a proper library, it seemed. A leaky old drill hall, remnant of a ‘Dad’s Army’ mentality perhaps, but now pressed into service as a town lending library. The public purse could only stretch so far, after all.
Through the narrow double doors and up a short flight of steps, turn right and into the carpeted quiet of the large room. This is where the books lived.
No windows, just skylights, usually running with rain. To the left of the door was the issue desk and, through an opening behind that, the children’s library. I don’t remember staying there long, though, before pushing out into the deeper waters of the main collection.
And when you slid a book off the shelves and opened it, the fourth ingredient, the missing something, spilled out all over you – ideas.
Waiting for me there were the terrors and treasures of Ray Bradbury, the strange and daunting words of James Joyce, Picasso’s sickly-looking blue acrobats staring down from the wall above the shelves.
I was dumbfounded and appalled by Bob Dylan’s novel ‘Tarantula’ but delighted to the point of incoherence by BS Johnson’s collection of short pieces ‘Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs?’
The intellectual conundrums of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Aleph’ defeated me several times over the years, so much so that I grew wary of the Argentinian librarian’s twists and turns, only coming to love his work long after my library card had expired.
More earthly joys were to be found in the sophisticated and challenging adult fairytales of Angela Carter in her collections ‘Fireworks’ and ‘The Bloody Chamber’, while Michael Moorcock’s cool and multi-faceted creation Jerry Cornelius, along with his many friends and enemies, pointed towards dangerous delights to come.
There were hints of sexuality outside ‘the norm’, discovered, it seemed, in Alexandria by the likes of Constantine Cavafy and illustrated in 1960s Technicolor by some Yorkshireman called David Hockney. Though I was fairly sure this exotic brand of love wasn't for me.
A Frenchman called Baudelaire, long dead, did strange and enticing things with language (or perhaps it was all the fault of his translator). And a book of Concrete Poetry (strangely light for all that) introduced me to words straining to be pictures as well. Or vice versa.
American poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens seemed to hold a glamorous allure, beckoning from their ranks along the back wall of the room. Poetry crammed with ideas by the likes of Octavio Paz jostled for position with more popular verse from Rod McKuen, while, closer to home, the work of Idris Davies, Peter Finch and Herbert Williams proved there was poetic life right here in Wales.
In the non-fiction section, Wilfred Mellers’ book ‘The Twilight Of The Gods’ taught me that there was more to The Beatles’ music than met the ear, while a huge book of photographs by Lord Snowdon called ‘Private View’ introduced me through its richly-coloured pages to many of the important British painters of the 1960s.
And there were so many more. Their titles have slipped beyond the reach of my memory now, but each of them was a stone laid in the path that led me beyond the narrow confines of school, street and home.
This extraordinary literary phantasmagoria, now long disappeared, was the work of just one man, the branch librarian. Fur-hatted like a Soviet commissar against the Valleys winter and striding out of his small corner office in a big overcoat, his beard and eyebrows set firm. An unsettling figure to a small boy.
Only years later did it become clear why he had chosen the books I had the pleasure to read. Despite what he did to earn his daily bread, he wasn’t REALLY a librarian at all; he was a poet in disguise.
Swansea-born, Oxford-educated and a former Royal Navy seaman, Harri Webb took up his job at Mountain Ash in 1964, virtually creating the library service from scratch.
His own poetry found a place on the shelves, of course, and I found it entertaining if too political for my then limited understanding. I’ve since met people who knew Harri Webb personally and I’ve found out about his fervent Welsh nationalism. But I prefer to remember him as the enigmatic and important keeper of the books, with his stern gaze and grey-flecked beard; if I’d met him, no doubt that character would have disappeared like mist being burned off by sunlight. But he retired in 1974, passing away in 1996, and I never did get to meet him.
That library has gone now and a new one has taken its place, across the bridge and down the main road a little way. I don’t live in Mountain Ash any more, so I’ve never visited it, but I know without looking that the books there wouldn’t be half as enticing or mysterious as the ones in the old drill hall. It’s still here in my head, of course, and echoes of it remain on my own shelves.
No doubt there were pennies to be pinched in the relatively halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s, just as there are today, but Harri Webb did it in an elegant, learned way and never bowed to the pressure of the merely popular.
One autumn day, I picked out a book written by a man with a glamorous name. Wolfe. Thomas Wolfe. A strong, dangerous name if ever I’d heard one. This had to be a good book; nobody with a name like that could write a bad book, surely? Flipping open the cover to taste the first paragraphs, I passed the date stamps and couldn’t help but notice when it had last been borrowed. Over five years ago. Imagine that, the poor unloved thing.
My teenaged mind thought that maybe this wasn’t such a good book after all. But then, I reminded myself, so many of the others that had sat largely ignored on the shelves had proved to be crammed with jewels.
Maybe ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ would similarly introduce me to ideas I wasn’t quite ready for, dictionary-hard words previously unread and novel notions that would stretch my thoughts beyond the everyday.
I clapped the cover shut, making more noise than I’d bargained for, and headed for the issue desk, hoping to negotiate the formidable library assistants without any problem and sneak my latest find out to the windy, unworthy street beyond the narrow double doors.

Mark Howard Jones is a prose writer who lives in Cardiff. His latest novella 'The Garden of Doubt on the Island of Shadows' is available from Manchester's ISMs Press at www.kissthewitch.co.uk

What a Carve-up?

I came across this fascinating New York Times article the other day. It raises some important questions, I think, about the degree of influence an editor has over a writer's work. If Carver really was desperately unhappy about planned changes, should his editor have given way? After all, the edited versions are what made Carver's reputation. Is the issue, in fact, that editors get too little credit, when we're talking about live writers, at least (they generally get a better deal when they've rounded up the works of dead writers)? In the music world, for example, producers are often recognised for the large amount of creative input they have, so why should it be different in the world of literature?
I'd have to say that my own very limited experience of editors, with my chapbook and with magazines, has been very good. It's good to be forced to justify (to yourself as much as to anyone else) just why a certain line or image needs to stay in place, and of course there's always the couldn't-see-it-for-looking-at-it type of howler or bum note.

Poetry launch

I got an invitation the other day to a launch reading being held at The Guildhall, Leicester, next Monday at 7.30pm. The books in question are Torso, by Robert Hamberger, and Catch, by Katie Daniels, both published by Redbeck, while Robert will also be reading from his Flarestack sequence Heading North, which looks at John Clare's 1841 escape from High Beach lunatic asylum.
I wouldn't have thought it's by invitation only, so if you're interested in finding out more, you can email kfeatherstone@leics.gov.uk
Say hello if you're there!

Word association

The details of your own blog at statcounter.com occasionally make worryingly addictive browsing. In the past, visitors to Polyolbion have tended to arrive via disappointingly mundane searches, but a look at this week's Key Words Analysis reveals that things have changed somewhat.
"words to mason williams’ them poems" just about makes sense, but "ventriloquism goldfinch"? "poem describing george best?"? And lastly, "who was"? God only knows how many results they got for a search like that.

FIN

Martin Stannard's blog Exultations and Difficulties contains news of the launch of a new Nottingham-based poetry magazine, FIN. I'd give it a plug in the interests of local solidarity anyway, but the contributors mentioned look both varied and excellent, and it's a very reasonable £12 for four issues. Well worth a look.

Lean times

It is, apparently, going to be a tough winter over here for small birds. The berry, beechmast, seed and acorn crop has been poor both here and in Scandinavia (bad years usually follow particularly good years), so expect your garden to fill up with birds desperate to find your feeders overflowing. I've already seen loads of Jays on the move, and some big flocks of Goldfinches, and my parents saw a Bullfinch in their garden the other day for the first time in about 25 years. So do what you can - even if you don't put actual feeders out, the odd bit of soft fruit can make a big difference.