Mark Burnhope: The Snowboy

In October, I attended a poetry reading in Oxford where various Salteenies were reading (poets published by Salt) and one of the new books of poetry I picked up that night was by one of the readers, Mark Burnhope.

His first pamphlet, The Snowboy, published this year, is priced at £6.50 - which I found rather steep for a pamphlet of 28 pages. (Luckily, he offered me a small discount when I made my sad spaniel face.) But the quality of Burnhope's poetry is also steep, which made up for the high price. (I also notice it is currently reduced to £5.20 on the Salt website, which is more realistic from a buyer's point of view.)

Burnhope's work is an odd but dynamic combination of mythic or lyrical influences and sudden flat prosaic touches. He is not afraid to declaim or strike postures, which is something I thought had died out with the last of the Romantics, suggesting a return to that contradictory attitude of self-conscious looking outwards which is somehow embarrassing and yet satisfying to encounter. It's an attitude which says to the listener or reader, at least on a subliminal level: 'I am a Poet and this is Poetry with a capital P, yet I am perfectly well aware of what's being written today, thank you, as well as what was written three hundred years ago.'

Being wheelchair-bound, Mark Burnhope's poetry gives us an unusual perspective on life, of seeing things that perhaps others miss, and also an awareness of his own peculiarly stand-out - perhaps even combative? - spatial relationship with the world. One of the most compelling poems in the book is his bold 'Wheelchair, Recast as a Site of Special Pastoral Interest':

O evil scaffold, levelled
             and controlled by spirit.
O wing-black spectral-silver mass;
crass imposition upon the meadow
formed of iron-carbon alloy - steel -
and foam; O folk dance of spoke,
            wheel, tyre, seat, the latter
            to which, flush out of the field,
            the executed calf
                        and ewe contributed.

Here the hard, metallic, man-made structure of the wheelchair is placed in creative tension with the softer, ever-changing elements of the natural world, i.e. the 'meadow' (not a field, please note, which would be agricultural and therefore equally manmade) and the 'calf and ewe' (here, definitely from the 'field'). The 'folk dance' works beautifully with that idea of a pre-industrial world, a celebration of life and death, the 'executed calf' recalling the prodigal son's return, the forgiveness of the father for his wayward child.

And you also catch the most vital element of Burnhope's writing here, which is predominantly aural, focused on how the sounds strike the ear and play against each other. 'O, O, O,' this poem says. An exclamation, a sound of distress, an invocation on a stage. The wheel revolving. That final 'meadow' both prepares for and sparks off 'O folk dance of spoke'. Bach makes it into the final lines, 'bounding over the vales', as though the wheelchair had been constructed by music, or to music, so that music was somehow inherent in its structure, with 'vales' in the last line suggesting tears.


So the poet's love-hate relationship with his wheelchair does not so much dominate this book as underscore it musically. In a dream where he is imagined without it, Burnhope writes with grim humour:

In the absence of a wheelchair, I am walking
on one paw like a cirque-du-freak performer.

This seems to suggest that he sees the wheelchair as almost a normalising influence, a damping-down of creative energy, where its absence might allow him to become a daring 'performer', albeit one whose differentness is what people primarily flock to see, that 'paw' in place of a hand bringing an animalistic touch to the image. Burnhope's wild side? He then sees himself morphing into a scorpion that stings itself to death, perhaps through too much introspection. Other poems here mention sperm whales, Moby Dick, tentacles, skate, a cormorant ... Burnhope's touchstone is the sea, and it is a recurring image in this debut, as are those creatures which live within it.

Also a Christian, much of the imagery here finds its influence in the Christian religion, though with a certain dark pagan twist at times. (O folk dance ... ) I tend to dislike contemporary religious verse with extreme vehemence, though it's hard not to admire the sparing delicacy and slate-sharp edges of a poet like R.S. Thomas. It's also hard not to see that - very pleasing - influence at work here in Burnhope's debut:

Boscombe Pier pierces

the sea. On either side of me
the promenade extends

arms that end
in bending wrists of cliff-side.

The land is dark, but look, his fists
pin-lit,

loosing breakers overnight.

I want to ask Burnhope what 'pin-lit' means here - Christ's stigmata, one assumes, doubling up with the pinpoints of penny arcade or promenade lights - where or indeed what is the main verb, and how dare he casually toss the trauma of 'extends/ends/bending' into three consecutive lines and leave us to wrestle with that oblique, not quite understandable finale while we are still reeling from all those vibrating 'end' sounds? Meanwhile, this rather fine and striking piece of Christian imagery is a direct rebuttal to the prosaic opening to this poem, 'Christ is not your friend our lecturer said.'

Frankly, yes, wrong in places. But I love it. Not the opening though. I would say here, have the courage to back away from the inspiration for this poem, which adds nothing, and perhaps even detracts from or diminishes what follows it, and develop the lyric impulse instead. That's where the true power lies. Not in what we perceive as 'truth' (like those poor souls at open mic nights who say of their poems, as if to reassure us that it's not mere flim-flam, 'This really happened', not knowing that they are robbing their work of any possible power it might have possessed to ferry us into the magic territory of the 'story', as opposed to the stifling airing cupboard of the anecdote) but in the purely imaginary, the vital thought or image which creates its own reality as we attempt to capture it in a poem.

Though perhaps the prosaic is what anchors the poetry for Burnhope, gives the more powerful imagery  an excuse to exist without sounding like 'Art for Art's sake'. Well, I can see how that might happen. But we don't always need to see the working out. Sometimes the solution is better presented naked and shorn of its original props.

What else? Assonance and alliteration like an insane rash. Yes, yes, yes. Let's get back to that in poetry. An odd and discordant use of verbs, or nouns that double up as verbs, or possibly do, so that the poem is constantly wrongfooting the listener, i.e. 'Where the one/we conceived on Christmas Eve/ pools, swaddles grass'. I mean, just read that first clause again. What the... ?

But again, I welcome it. Somewhere beneath the slightly tyro feel to these pieces is my kind of poetry. It's not boring. It has the ability to slap you in the face without being unsubtle about such a gesture. It possesses oddly beautiful and powerful imagery. It hints at dark undercurrents which I would love to see coming to the fore. And above all, it is Poetry, and is unafraid of that concept.

I'm very rarely excited and interested by new books of poetry, being a curmudgeonly sort. But there's something in Burnhope's debut which makes me hope he isn't easily satisfied by what he's got here. Because if he is, he will have thrown away his chance to be a truly excellent poet.

Help to encourage a new poet. Grab a copy of Mark Burnhope's The Snowboy from Salt Publishing or Amazon.

Ridi, Pagliaccio, ridi!

I was born with a strong inner critic, so I'm never surprised or offended when someone says 'Actually, this doesn't work' about my writing. I'm usually there before them, already wondering how to fix it or improve it, and I'm often grateful to have those doubts spotted by someone else in the trade, as it demonstrates that I'm not imagining things.

If they tell me such things with a laughing sneer, or an obvious agenda, or if they have almost no experience in that line, then I probably have a right to be suspicious. But if they are experienced and have no reason to speak up except in the interests of helping people understand the work better - and that includes the person who wrote it - then why should I not take what they say at face value and examine it with an equal mind?

Sadly, that response to criticism is beyond some writers. They would rather believe the person pointing out the fault is wrong - either incompetent or deliberately nasty - than believe they might need to correct an imbalance in their work.

It's like throwing a line to someone who's in trouble in the water, and having them flail about angrily and question your motives in stopping to help, rather than grabbing on.

I am convinced that this aching sense of self-importance and rightness is connected to an inability to laugh at themselves.

Self-mockery is a necessary correlative to success as a writer - or a lack of it. Without humour, you rapidly lose perspective on yourself and become either an egotistical monster, convinced of your divine right to crow from the top of the dung-heap, or a twisted creature in the dark, bitterly blaming others for your lack of success.

Naturally, the opposite is simultaneously true.  A strong writer must have an absolute sense of mission and purpose, and be able to shrug off criticism at will. But without perspective and humour to temper that side of the creative process, all that is created is more ego.

Don't like the book you're reviewing? Too bad, you'd better praise it anyway.

I join the growing number of people who are quite rightly disgusted and appalled by recent online attacks on Todd Swift, whose review of the new Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade - which was not a negative review, but did ask important questions about the selection process - has attracted some astonishingly hostile and aggressive reactions.

See the comment threads at Eyewear for examples. There are plenty in the post I link to and in other posts on the same blog, and on Facebook, Twitter etc.

The fact that most of these people know each other in person, and are almost all key players in the book under review makes the whole thing even more disturbing. Would you see such a public and widespread attack being allowed to happen in the film industry, in theatre, even in book reviewing?

What does all this mean for the future of poetry criticism? As Graham Hardie points out on Eyewear: 'it begs the question are we not allowed as editors to express our thoughts and opinions in our publications without fear of reprisals/witch hunts/obnoxious e-mails etc?'

Billy Collins, review at Tower Poetry

Just flagging up my review of former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins' latest collection on Tower Poetry.

Reviewing (and the importance of the line-break)

I seem to go through phases in my writing. Some months it's prose fiction, others it's poetry, and still others it's reviewing. Not that I don't mix and match occasionally, but prose and poetry do feel like natural opposites - enemies, even? - and so try not to do both at the same time, or not without experiencing a little inner tension.

This month, I've been writing some new poems, revising old ones, and also working up to a handful of reviews I've got in hand, one bunch for Iota and the other for Poetry Review. By working up to them, I don't mean girding my loins, i.e. mentally preparing myself, but reading the books in question, making a few notes, and generally allowing the poems I've read to circulate creatively in my mind.

It's an instructive exercise, reviewing. Having to formulate your thoughts on someone else's poetry can make you return to your own work with a more analytical eye. Or it can make you despondent, if the poet you're reviewing happens to be very good!

Something that has a strong effect on me at the moment is the line-break. I'm becoming a little obsessed, perhaps, with the ramifications of the line-break. It was always a defining moment for me in the poems I have written, but it now seems, more than ever, the key to a good poem. Or perhaps, deeper than that, the key to what kind of poet one is or becomes.

So when I review books of poetry, one of the most important things I'm instinctively - rather than overtly - noticing as I read through, is the line-break. Which really means, I'm listening to the rhythms of the poem even more than I'm listening to the surface meaning, because in a bad poem the line-break struggles against the meaning in a clumsy and inapposite way, and in a good poem, the line-break hands you the sense and feel of the poem both aurally and visually, without effort.

This was meant to be a post about reviewing, but perhaps it's secretly a post about the importance of the line-break. Which is indeed the very thing vexing and exciting me this morning.

New Poem (a Sapphic) in the latest Poetry Review

The latest issue of the flagship magazine of the Poetry Society, Poetry Review, is just out this week, and I have a brand-new poem in it, entitled Sapphic: Jamesian, Aureate.

I also have a review of poetry books by Wendy Cope, Maureen Duffy and Patience Agbabi amongst its pages.

To buy or subscribe to Poetry Review, you can visit their website here. It's £30 for the magazine (4 issues a year) or £40 for the magazine PLUS membership of the Society, with all the usual perks.

There's some discussion of the latest issue recently on Poets on Fire, for those interested in forum life.

Amazon Reviews

My third poetry collection Camper Van Blues has been out a few months now, and still no reviews on Amazon. Which is rather sad. If anyone has read Camper Van Blues, and would like to leave a few comments on Amazon, I'd be ever so grateful. I'm sure it must help to boost sales if there's at least a few reviews. Assuming, that is, that most of them don't begin 'Don't waste your money on this steaming pile of utter ... etc.'

If you're willing, here's Camper Van Blues on Amazon.co.uk.

*

The TLS, Horizon Review, and Throckmorton's Bookshop

I'm very happy to say that Horizon Review made the back page of the TLS this week. My colourful past as editor was flagged up for comment rather than any of the many excellent - some of them award-winning - poets, writers and critics in this first issue, but all publicity is good publicity, as they say.

I'm now selecting new poetry for the second issue, commissioning new critical articles, and looking for literary reviewers. This last is proving harder than I'd imagined. It appears I know only poets and poetry-lovers.

So if you're highly literate and critically engaged - or at least prepared to be - and fancy a crack at reviewing some brand-new literary novels later this year or early next, give me a shout.

I read some of my new work at the Atherstone Arts Festival, Warwckshire, today. Wine was enjoyed afterwards by myself, my fellow readers, and some of the audience in Throckmorton's Bookshop. An excellent bookshop to visit if you're in the area, and not least because they stock several of my books!

Critics Inc.

CHROMA: Want to learn how to review Poetry?

Found this fascinating. A London-based Poetry School course on how to review poetry, with well-known critic Charles Bainbridge. A very worthy thing, I suspect, teaching people how to review.

If it was even remotely possible, which it isn't, I'd take this course myself. It sounds marvellous and I bet some of the post-class pub conversations would be worth the trip too. If you think cramming fifteen poets onto one table at the pub could make for a bitchy conversation, just imagine the potential ding-dong between fifteen poetry critics.

5000 page views in the first 48 hours

The first issue of Horizon Review appears to have been well-received so far and is certainly bringing in the hits.

Some excellent stats here from Chris Hamilton-Emery on the Booktrade info page.

Meanwhile, back at the word-face, this week I have:

offered some new poetry books for review to various magazines

started - but not yet finished - a tongue-in-cheek 1000 word article on poem titles for Mimesis

written two more poems

emailed 10 finished poems across to the organisers for the Warwick Festival Photography and Poetry Exhibition that's planned for early October

enrolled at Warwick University for a BA in English & Cultural Studies

made final arrangements to read at the Atherstone Arts Festival on Saturday 27th September

continued reading Simon Barraclough's Los Alamos Mon Amour (which I'm reviewing for Under the Radar)

blogged up some Warwick Words Festival and Birmingham Books Festival events on my Warwick Poet Laureate blog

booked a restaurant for Friday night - my husband's 43rd birthday! - which will be our first meal out together in months

emailed all publishers with books under review in HR with a link to the reviews pages

begun commissioning articles and reviews for the second issue of Horizon Review

set myself to learn some deponent verb forms in Latin - OU examination coming up on October 8th!

printed out the first three chapters of my Young Adult fantasy novel, for some last minute revisions before it wings its way to a highly recommended literary agent next week

managed to slot in some new last-minute names to read at next month's Festival Poetry Cafe in Warwick

groaned over forgetting again to review Brendan Cleary's pamphlet for Write out Loud

got more than five hours' sleep on at least TWO occasions so far!

Los Alamos Mon Amour

Reading this new Forward-shortlisted debut poetry collection by Simon Barraclough at the moment, and also sharing it with my husband, who keeps surreptitiously stealing it from me in moments of domestic distraction, i.e. while wrestling with the preparation of a typically late supper or collecting the children's school uniforms for washing.

Can't say much else, as I'm reviewing Los Alamos Mon Amour for Under the Radar, and would prefer to keep my thoughts for that sparkly new publication.

But I certainly admire the title. And this hardback with its stunning cover illustration, as a physical object, is beautiful to behold and own.

Camper Van Blues

I have now officially finished Camper Van Blues, my third poetry collection, and apart from the usual fiddly last minute stuff that manuscripts always seem to demand, I'm free to start work on my next big project. Which is probably going to be a sequence of poems about Warwick Castle, in association with my work as this year's Warwick Laureate, though I haven't yet decided what final shape that will take.

I am also free to post up new review work again on Raw Light. I've got an ever-growing stack of poetry books that I'd like to mention here, so reviewing is near the top of my to-do list for March. I also have some commissioned review work to undertake for a magazine, plus a long critical essay to plan and discuss with another editor. So while I swing out of one tree, there's another creeper waiting for my hand ...

There she is above, my old seven-berth Mercedes camper van. Gone to the great parking lot in the sky now, alas, but she was a wonderful ship.

Areté 22

I imagine that Craig Raine still receives visitors and students in his airy front parlour in New College Lane, Oxford, seated immediately beneath a strikingly realistic painting of Craig Raine seated in his airy front parlour in New College Lane, Oxford. It's a postmodern experience, gazing from the real writer to the framed one above, and suitably surreal too, since you're in conversation with the poet who invented 'Martian' poetry.*

In 1999, I was among fifteen or so students at Oxford who attended Craig Raine's yearly ‘poetry class’ that Trinity term. Once a week, we would meet at his place in New College Lane to discuss poets and poetry, a few of us adjourning afterwards to the college bar to continue our - often very lively! - discussions there. Sometimes Craig would come with us to the bar. He’s the sort of tutor who likes to mix with his students, to chat about poetry and perhaps influence some of them towards his way of thinking.

So what is Craig Raine’s way of thinking?

Well, his ‘Arts Tri-Quarterly’ magazine Areté may hold some clues, edited by CR with Deputy Editor Ann Pasternak Slater (his wife). Still being based in Oxford when the magazine was launched - around the millennium - I bought the first few issues and found them a difficult read, full of worthy but obscure articles on literary figures whose works I had yet to encounter. Last week, I sent off for a copy of the recently published Areté 22, with its smart red cover, and was pleasantly surprised to find myself not merely understanding it - in places, it has to be said - but enjoying it too.

There are quasi-comical pieces here, including an article ‘On Being a Film Star’ by Susan Hitch and a poem by John Fuller, ‘My Life on the Margins of Celebrity’, plus a poem extract (from a verse novel?) entitled ‘The Broken Word’ by Adam Foulds, which is so lengthy it would have taken me several hours to read. So I'm afraid that I've not yet attempted that. The whole book is due to be published by Cape in 2008.

There are also two hefty essays on contemporary poetry, one by Craig Raine, entitled ‘Little Big Man: The Poetry of Don Paterson’ and the other by Areté Assistant Editor, Adam Thirlwell: ‘On Bad Poetry: Daljit Nagra’. The magazine holds other delights - it covers Fiction, Poetry, Reportage and Reviews, over some 150 pages - but I will only be dealing with the two poetry articles here.

CR’s main objective - in his Paterson essay, at least - seems to be that of discomforting the reader. And not only the reader, but the poet under review, I should imagine, as the article contains such astringent observations on his poetry as the following, which comes after an unfavourable examination of his 1994 Arvon prize-winning poem ‘A Private Bottling’: ‘Worse than any of these specific flaws, though, is a general disposition to annex mystical territory, a grandiose pretence, a self-aggrandising weakness for talking things up. In a word, exaggeration, a kind of immodesty that relies on no one calling your bluff’.

When I first started to read Raine’s essay on Paterson, I certainly felt uncomfortable and was prepared to disagree with his findings before I had even read the whole article. Landing Light is among my favourite new(ish) collections at the moment, and I found many of Paterson’s observations in his 2004 TS Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, highly apposite and credible. In that much, therefore, Paterson is a poet I trust.

But I soon found myself having to reassess my knee-jerk reaction to the icy bucket of water Raine throws over Paterson’s oeuvre. He isn’t so much indulging himself in critical vitriol as making some salient points about lazy writing and unintended humour in DP’s work. By the end of his essay, in fact, I had been brought to a point where I was able to agree with Raine on several points, even concerning some of Paterson’s better-known poems which I had previously admired. As you can imagine, having my own judgement challenged in this way was a difficult but salutary experience for me.

It’s important for poets - and poetry critics - to have scant respect for accepted wisdom, beliefs and authorities, and to rely instead on their own instincts when reading poetry. Craig Raine, in his role here as critic, is like the little boy in the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the one who refuses to go along with the charade, not because he has superior intelligence or keener eyesight than the rest, but because he has strong instincts and has not been cowed into ignoring them.

Correspondingly, his analysis of Don Paterson’s poetry is about exploding rather than exploring the man’s reputation. Let me be clear here. His essay is unnecessarily personal and is even guilty of wilfully missing the point on occasion in order to send up Paterson’s style - often hilariously. But that doesn’t mean CR is wrong on all counts. It just means he’s rude.

It becomes easy, when moving in particular circles on a regular basis, to fall into a pattern of responses to contemporary poetry which may not bear much resemblance to your earliest instincts as a reader. We call this process education, a useful by-product of reading a great deal of a certain sort of poetry and criticism, but it can also become indoctrination: one party imposing their beliefs on another, this latter usually less experienced and therefore more open to influence.

I consider myself open to influence on various levels, though far less than when I was just starting out in poetry. The most useful thing I learnt at Oxford was to question everything, regardless of appearances or reputation. This has bestowed on me a certain fearlessness on the one hand, but on the other a constantly shifting scale of literary values which can be confusing at times, liberating at others.

I enjoy Don Paterson’s poetry. At its best, it lifts and inspires me to write. But Craig Raine’s essay has shown me weaknesses in the work which had been obscured for me by that sense of enjoyment.

And since all things lead back to one’s own work - for poetry is the most self-obsessed literary form and poets the least interested in each other’s current work, beyond ambition or necessary politeness at parties - I am also indebted to Raine’s essay for highlighting weaknesses which exist in my own poetry too: ‘opaque syntax’, ‘sentimental and clumsy’, ‘verbal incompetence’, and even this sideways swipe at W.B. Yeats for similar crimes against poetry: ‘Padding, confusion, reprise. Usually in Yeats, the flaw is the separation of subject and predicate by unwieldy parenthesis. To be in such exalted company might cheer Paterson. It shouldn’t. A fault is a fault.’

But I'm not entirely swayed by CR's invective. There are a number of mistakes here, misreadings and misunderstandings. I don’t agree, for instance, that ‘the pearl sits knuckled in its silk’ in 'Letter to the Twins' is a poor description of a clitoris. CR may examine his own knobbly fingers at this point and fail to see the comparison, but let me assure him, a woman’s knuckles are not only far more petite, but an excited clitoris does protrude like a knuckle on a clenched fist. Not on the same size scale, of course, but enough to make the comparison allowable. Trust me, I’ve seen this.

: wicked smile:

And while it may seem a tenuous stretch to CR, if we use Paterson's own theory of a network of words and meanings suggested by the interplay of sounds within a word or line, the justification for 'knuckled' becomes stronger, reinforcing the sexual imagery here by hinting at: 'nuzzled, 'fucked', 'sucked' and, when taken in conjunction with 'silk' further along the line, even 'licked'. Craig Raine's own preference for the exact metaphor rather than the allusive, suggestive one hampers his ability to enjoy the range of Paterson's imagery here.

There are also flashes of delightful malice in this essay where I simply had to stop, read something out to my husband, and wipe my eyes before reading on. This, for instance, describing an unfortunately phrased line, again from Paterson’s poem, ‘Letter to The Twins’: ‘That last line is a minor miracle of ugliness. You want to take it to Lourdes.’

Overall then, an accomplished piece of critical thinking and sheer braggadocio from Craig Raine. Adam Thirlwell’s piece on Daljit Nagra’s debut collection, by contrast, is heavily defensive in tone and suffers from not really having understood the poet’s intentions. I’ve reviewed Look We Have Coming to Dover! myself, so have a fair grasp of the book’s style and contents, and I felt Thirlwell had decided on a theme for his essay first - in this case, ‘Bad Poetry’ - then tried to fit that theme to the collection in front of him, apparently oblivious to any mismatch.

There are also frequent bizarre echoes between Thirlwell’s phraseology and that of Craig Raine, as here when discussing ‘Bibi & the Street Car Wife!’: ‘I can ignore the hamfisted beefburgering: I can’t ignore the ugliness of these two lines’ (my italics). At another point, he uses exactly the same phrase Raine applies to one of Paterson’s poems in his own essay, describing Nagra’s work as ‘an allegory of deracination’. Thirlwell also throws the same complaints of ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘imprecision’ at the younger poet, complaining of similarly incompetent writing.

For Paterson’s extensive oeuvre to be attacked is fair enough. As an experienced poet with many accolades under his belt, he’s perfectly able to rebuff such critical attacks and probably expects them as a matter of course.

But to launch this entirely negative and thoroughly hostile 10 page rocket assault on a debut collection is, to my mind, unacceptable behaviour. To raise doubts may be a necessary thing, especially when a new poet has landed a contract with a publisher as internationally renowned as Faber. But it’s one thing to raise doubts and quite another to steamroller a debut collection into the ground.

This sort of nonsense smacks of vindictiveness and is in very poor taste. Besides which, it’s simply not effective criticism to pick at every line for its supposed obscurity - most of these poems are deliberately written in pidgin English, for god’s sake - and then end with a pronouncement as painfully sententious as ‘bad poetry is the mausoleum of language’. The same, I'm afraid, can be applied to bad criticism.

Not that I would use that particular phrase myself, bowdlerised from Baudelaire; I’d be too embarrassed.

***

* 'Martian' poetry is a phrase coined by James Fenton in a review of Craig Raine's first collection A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. It refers to a way of writing which assumes no prior knowledge of everyday items and so employs unusual and striking metaphors and other tropes to describe such objects, as though the narrator is a Martian. As an entertaining aside, Martianism is an anagram of Martin Amis, also known to have employed this peculiarly vivid writing style.

Bare Bones, Old Friends & Big Guns

I've just had a striking idea for a new novel - 'Lit Lite', I suspect! - which is desperately inconvenient as we're in the middle of being evicted here. I have ideas all the time, of course, like most writers. But this one has particular promise, not least because it makes delicate little connections with some of the emotional hurdles I've faced over the past ten years.

I've put the bare bones of the plot down in a notebook and will revisit it in a few weeks, just to see if it still resonates with me. I'm pleased to have come up with a new idea anyway, even if it ends up being unwritable. I have to finish something else I've been working on before I can start work on a new book, but at least this will mean I have an interesting project lined up for that twilight time just after you've moved house, when your brain is still shifting aimlessly about in the dust and chaos, looking for something solid to cling onto.

I met the editor of established poetry magazine SEAM the other week, the formidable Anne Berkeley. It was at the Cambridge CB1 reading; she very kindly bought a copy of Boudicca & Co., and asked me to send her some poems for the magazine. Of course, I do have some new poems available, but I'm not entirely convinced by them yet. Another month or two, perhaps. They don't seem quite bedded down into themselves, still something a bit provisional about them. But she put me onto an old friend, via email, whom I first met at an Arvon course many years ago: former editor at SEAM, Frank Dullaghan, who now lives and works in Dubai, and has a collection of poetry forthcoming from Cinnamon Press next year. It was good to touch base with him again.

Today someone on the Poem Forum was asking for hints and tips on approaching literary editors about writing reviews for them. Coincidentally I had just been reading some superb past issues of Mslexia - to be picked up for a song via their website if you're a woman writer or interested in women's writing - including one which featured an article on approaching magazine editors as a book reviewer. I've been thinking for some time myself about stepping up a gear in terms of reviewing, but haven't yet motivated myself to send a sample poetry review to the big guns (TLS, LRB etc), so it was a jolt to my ambition to answer the guy's post with some salient points. I've become contented, I think, just to review for the 'usual suspects' and not look any higher. But one of the points Mslexia frequently makes is that women writers tend not to be as ambitious and inclined to aim high as their male counterparts.

Time to do something about that uncharacteristic lack of inclination, I think ...