"Disreputable" launches as an ebook!

Browse this book on Amazon UK

I have just revised and launched the Kindle edition - also available to read on computers and smart phones - of my debut poetry collection (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), currently priced at only £2.14.

Originally published together under the title 'The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman', some of these tender young poems also appeared in: Blade, The Guardian, Iron, London Magazine, The Mail on Sunday, Making for Planet Alice (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), Oasis, PN Review, Poetry Review, Snooker Scene and The Times Literary Supplement.

Retitled "Disreputable", this collection is published here for the first time in digital form with some alterations of individual poems and a minor reshuffle of the order. I've even slung a few poems out that were either embarrassing, never really worked, or were just filler and didn't earn their place in the book. In these poems, English lyricism meets snooker exposé, the longer narrative form is explored, poetic influences are mocked and celebrated. The book holds something for everyone, in other words, and is unusual among debut collections in its experimental variety of form and subject matter.

'Jane Holland uses language both as a weapon and as a shield. This is an intelligent book, knife-sharp at moments, tender and gentle at others' - Brendan Kennelly.

'Poetically she puts the balls down with an elan rare in new poets' - Peter Forbes, The Guardian.

I originally wrote "Disreputable" back in the mid-Nineties, staggering about with all my influences on my back. It's the usual raw magic and intestines of a young poet's debut. But some of the poems here won me an Eric Gregory Award in 1996, and it's great value at £2.14.

Hope you feel able to grab a copy - bearing in mind that you don't need a Kindle to read an Amazon ebook; just go to the Amazon page and follow the sidebar instructions to download FREE software for reading Kindle books on your computer, phone or other devices.

Happy browsing!

And if you're based in the US or thereabouts, here's the link to "Disreputable" on Amazon.com.

New Poem at Stride Magazine

I have a new poem up at Stride online magazine, entitled 'Adventure Sky!'

Those of a delicate or very conservative disposition should sit down before reading it.

The long-awaited fourth issue of Horizon Review is due out very, very soon. Or so I am assured by Chris and his team at Salt.

I also feel it may be time for a facelift at Raw Light. Trumpet chorus. This writing blog has been going since early 2005, and has only had two changes of decor since then. I'm not thinking of anything radical at this stage. Just some light colour and sidebar design changes, perhaps. I shall see what's readily available on Blogger and do some tinkering.

Anything to avoid writing my novel!

And now, here's a very short YouTube film of my youngest daughter, whom I sent out last summer with a camera and instructions to do some filming at Richborough in Kent, one of the earliest Roman ports. Here, she demonstrates a cheerful, journalistic disregard for historical accuracy ...

At the time, she was five years old.

Boscastle Revisited

Boscastle, after the flood

We're off on holiday tomorrow to sunny Cornwall, where we lived for some years round the turn of the millennium. My eldest daughter is staying behind to hold the fort (she has a good job at the moment and is saving towards university, so quite rightly didn't fancy the idea of two weeks in a crowded tent with her parents and assorted siblings). But the rest of us will be stretching out in the glorious rain ... I mean sun ... for the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, here's a Cornish poem from my forthcoming collection, Camper Van Blues. It's never been published before, even in a poetry magazine, so I thought Raw Light could have it before it becomes crystallised in book form.

This poem, 'Rain', is a sister poem to my shorter poem 'Flood at Boscastle', which appeared in Poetry Review a while back.

'Flood at Boscastle' came out of notes I made a few years ago whilst in the Bull Ring in central Birmingham (and reading Robin Robertson's book 'Swithering', interestingly enough). I expanded those initial notes over several months, remembering what it was like to live at Boscastle before the flood, the devastation it had caused compared to the memory of the neat little village that we had in our heads, then pared that material down to create 'Flood at Boscastle', which is available to read on my Salt Publishing page.

It was only in late 2007 that I returned to the discarded notes and began cutting away at them, moving sections, adding new pieces, experimenting with various different forms, and eventually ended up with this much longer poem, 'Rain', presented in couplets. Please note though, since I'm not greatly skilled at HTML and don't have time to fiddle with this, that in the book each second line is indented. Here they both sit snugly against the left-hand margin.

Meanwhile, I hope you all have a great summer, and for my own part, that it doesn't flood again while we're back in Cornwall!

Jx

*

RAIN

I

First, there was a rustle of frogs
unseen in bracken, parched

singing for rain
like all the frogs of the Amazon, for rain

like the beginning of things
over tired roofs and gutterings, for rain

deep and steady
over cliff paths and gorse

where workers once held land
strip upon strip

shining under the deluge, for rain
in the blown-out ford

slung black with, waist-deep in water
from these hills

hard-beat-against, untenable, for rain
falling through bruised light

grey-purple onto fishing nets
like giant spiders’ webs

draped in gleaming strands
across the wet stone quay

her cobbled streets back-lit
with a silver tattoo, with RAIN

the sheer thirst of it
the first of it

a rustle of frogs (unseen in bracken)
parched, singing for rain

like all the frogs of the Amazon.



II

I came there most days in search of sea,
blind with it,

that salt blue slap of the cliff’s edge,
shy gaggle of houses

curved like a woman’s hips
about a sleeping river, her upturned face

beautiful (though wrinkled in summer;
mud ruts in high grass)

and still the rustle of frogs
parched, unseen,

singing for rain
like all the frogs of the Amazon.

I came for the gravestones, stern
under the downpour at Forrabury

already furred black with,
bolted with water

swelling the river
at the hard mouth of the harbour

its wrung neck
and sling-shot exit a jostle

of water against rock, narrowing
and funnelling,

churning
and trammelling up RAIN.

Perched antediluvian,
that’s how I remember it,

grey stone and Cornish slate
from that prehistoric crater at Delabole,

wind turbines
white noise in the dusk

and the sharpish approach to the harbour,
its corniche turns

and wind-sheer drop, gorse bright,
from the cliff edge

where I would come most days
in search of sea

(rocking the child inside, imagining flight,
that first curious step).

Most days I came in search of sea,
the constant boom and suck

of water on rock
like the beginning of things,

like salt, like rain,
like frogs, unseen in bracken,

singing, deep and steady,
thalassa/sea

like all the frogs of the Amazon.



III

And where the stifled river met
the dirty tide

it threw up bones of things, oddments
and fish, and wood adrift,

torn branches still in bud,
salted wet-black spars

and plastic bottles, bags,
arrow-tips of glass

rubbed down to frost
and always the rain

freakish in summer,
the frogs singing

and surging the blind river
down to the sea, down to wild water,

to that filthy driven flood
breaking its banks

and punching through walls,
bouncing campers and cars

and houses aside,
that old dirty tide

alive with rubbish and blossom
white as cottages

and whole trees, blown green to the sea,
a stone bridge cracked

and tossed in the long surge forward
EXCEPT

No hands were lost –
no hands were lost, even as cars bobbed off

sea-drunk into brickwork, crumbling
as cars weaved

battered and jobbed
and the edge of a building broke first

then the rest shot free into the foam
swept loose

by the blank untenanted ark
of a mobile home

and love poured down like rain, unseen,
and the frogs sang on

like all the frogs of the Amazon.

The Verb, Radio 3, featuring David Morley and THE INVISIBLE KINGS

Until Friday 28th September, I think, you should be able to catch the latest Verb show by clicking this link to Radio 3.

I've just been listening to the programme myself online and particularly enjoying the delights of David Morley reading from his brand-new Carcanet book of poetry, THE INVISIBLE KINGS, which Ian MacMillan, poet and Verb presenter, describes as 'a book that seems to redefine the things that poetry can do.'



THE INVISIBLE KINGS is a book of poetry about the Romani. David Morley is a Gajo, which means half-Romani, and has long avoided writing about his Romani heritage because discussing Romani business is considered 'bad manners' as he puts it on this radio show, with most family history kept secret or passed on orally. Following a reading in Sweden, however, he met an old family friend whose comments inspired him to go home and write these poems about his rich and often tragic tribal heritage, poems which are highly musical, declamatory and steeped in the Romani language. David Morley says, in fact, that this book 'completely wrote itself'.

I am in the middle of reading THE INVISIBLE KINGS myself, so was very interested to listen to this programme, not least because I felt it shed much-needed light on some of Morley's unusual and stirring poetry.

Listening to David Morley read the title poem here was a revelation. For a start, the lines are riddled with Romani words - translated on a separate page - and I was able to hear how they should be correctly pronounced and emphasised. I was also fascinated to learn that the title poem is written in the voice of a tribal shaman who is, like Morley himself, a Gajo - half-Romani. His thoughts, dreams, visions, stories and declarations make up the long poem - written in couplets and divided into several sections - that lies at the heart of THE INVISIBLE KINGS.

Here's the full line-up for last week's Verb (Radio 3):

David Morley
Ian McMillan talks to David Morley, the author of what promises to be one of the most thrilling volumes of poetry published this year - The Invisible Kings. Written partly in English and partly in Romani his poetry moves and sounds like music ... it zings with images from the natural world and gives voice to a culture that's emerging from the shadows.

Sarah Hall & D.J. Taylor
There are also two brand new pieces of writing inspired by water in general and flooding in particular. A short story by Sarah Hall, whose novel, The Electric Michelangelo was on the Booker Shortlist not so long ago and a meditation on words and water by her fellow novelist, D.J.Taylor.

Peter Blegvad
Peter Blegvad has composed one of his inimitable audio cartoons on the perils and pains of persistant scriptorum carborundum, also known as writer's block.

Beardyman
The Verb resonates to the sound of Beat Boxing - we have a short, not to say punchy guide to the history and practice of Beat Boxing from the acknowledged master, Beardyman.
*
You can buy David Morley's THE INVISIBLE KINGS here.

What Need of Poems in the Dark?

Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book

I’ve just enrolled on a course at Warwick, examining the influence of Dante in the poems of T.S. Eliot. That may be one reason why I kept catching echoes of both those poets in Sean O’Brien’s latest collection, The Drowned Book. His recent verse translation of Dante's Inferno provides another possible explanation to my feeling that the spirit of Dante presides over these poems, riddled as they are with references to the dead, the underworld and its rivers of darkness.



The Drowned Book is O’Brien’s seventh collection and a Poetry Book Society Choice. No stranger to such accolades, the prolific O’Brien has won the Forward Prize twice, for Ghost Train in 1995 and Downriver in 2001, and is wdely considered one of our most important living British poets. In this latest book, he certainly earns that status, his poetry skilfully written, richly layered and impressively accessible given the difficult themes and topics he tackles here.

O’Brien has, at times, the prophetic ‘tongues of flame’ and ‘knowledge like a skull inside a box’ of the ancient scholar he describes in ‘Serious Chairs’, though he often pretends otherwise, distracting us with the humility of the truly talented, most marked in his elegies for dead poets, as here in ‘Thom Gunn’ (another poet whose work at times signalled the influence of Dante):

Let those of us who longed to board but failed
Salute you in absentia, Captain Gunn,
Now attitude and argosy have sailed
Beyond the west.

Water and death seem inextricably linked in this book, as the title and suitably spooky-looking cover suggest. A glut of watery poem titles continue the theme, with ‘Water-Gardens’, The River in Prose’, ‘By Ferry’, ‘River-doors’, ‘The Mere’, ‘Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins’, and his magnificent elegy for Barry MacSweeney, ‘A Coffin-Boat’. His elegies include work dedicated to the memory of fallen comrades in contemporary poetry: Ken Smith, Julia Darling, Michael Donaghy and Barry MacSweeney (‘... let the man rest by the waters of Tyne’). Within the subterranean world of this book, O’Brien’s erudition brings a fascinating complexity to the work, his diction both eloquent and contemporary: a heady mix for any reader.

In spite of this strongly themed content, however, The Drowned Book doesn’t flag or begin to sound homogeneous as it progresses. Not content to write the same poem twice - or fifty times as a few of his contemporaries have been known to do - Sean O’Brien is happy here to switch forms and voices, experimenting within his own idiom and making each poem new.

So references to Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ and a heart-felt cry of ‘Thalassa, Thalassa’ (‘Sea, sea!’ from Xenophon’s account of fleeing Greek soldiers at last coming within sight of the sea) jostle for house room with these jaunty Skeltonesque rhyming couplets about death’s inevitability in ‘Timor Mortis’:

Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire
As conscripts of le grand nowhere -
Some on ice and some on fire,
Some with slow piano wire,
Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck
And absolutely out of luck.

In the same poem, O’Brien asks flatly: ‘What need of poems in the dark?’ Yet, whilst reminiscent of Marvell’s stance towards his coy mistress - ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace’ - this question is not without its ambivalence. This is evidenced elsewhere in the collection, most notably perhaps in the superb ‘Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright’ - winner of the 2006 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem - where the dead (presumably here miners) seem not only in need of such earthly pleasures but are actually still involved in them:

The singing of the dead inside the earth
Is like the friction of great stones, or like the rush

Of water into newly opened darkness.

I thought here of other subterranean worlds, of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, and the sinister Mines of Moira in The Lord of the Rings, especially following O’Brien’s marvellously described ‘thud of iron doors sealed once for all’ and the miners themselves, ‘gargling dust’, ‘their black-braided banners aloft’. But are these real human men? Are they memories of those who used to work ‘in the underground rivers/Of West Moor and Palmersville’, or are these the ghosts of fallen miners eternally patrolling the ‘tiny corridors of the immense estate’?

Although most of these poems are not obscure or difficult in themselves, I sometimes felt that a few notes might have elucidated the content or origin of a poem. Not being fully aware of the historical background to ‘Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright’ was an obstacle to enjoying what is otherwise a tremendously powerful and transformative piece of writing. I did perform an internet search on James Wright which gave me some extra information, but should having to google be an expected part of reading a poem now? Some poets don’t mind providing elucidatory notes, others disagree vehemently with the need for them. Personally, I’ve always found more pleasure in collections which are annotated, even if only briefly at the back. In the groping search for understanding, misreadings and missed nuances are always a danger - and a largely unnecessary one, it seems to me.



Many individual lines in The Drowned Book will stay with me a long time, such as this complicated beauty: ‘The city runs like science fiction backwards’. Or this, at once Dickensian and as atmospheric as a Turner oil painting: ‘A boat burning out on the flats’. Echoes of Eliot too, most strongly in the short choral poem ‘Proposal for a Monument to the Third International’, where I couldn’t help thinking of the well-known sequence in Little Gidding, where the narrator is heading home after a long night (Eliot worked as a volunteer rooftop fire warden in London during the war) and meets ‘a familiar compound ghost’ in the street, rather like Dante meeting Virgil, his guide through hell. Is this now Eliot meeting O'Brien or was that not the poet's intention? Even without these inferences, the apocalyptic and other-worldly ‘dream-vision’ quality of the moment, in particular, is what struck me most on reading this:

I rode to the twenty-ninth floor
Of the Hotel Ukraina, then climbed the last steps
To the last locked room
Where a camera obscura portrayed the night sky
As Stalin might dream it himself
From one of the seven dark stars he cast
So high that the heavens themselves
Were extinguished.

I turned to descend and there by the door
Was a wizened old man, sitting smoking.
A red fire-bucket was full of his ash.
He wore two watches and between his eyes
A bullet hole.
He looked indifferently through me.
Brothers, this is all I can recall.


However, the poem which affected me most powerfully in The Drowned Book was ‘A Coffin-Boat’, his quiet-spoken elegy for the poet Barry MacSweeney; not least, perhaps, because I knew the man myself. It’s a slightly longer poem than most, and here, once again, we have to bend our heads to enter its dark landscape - or should that be ‘inscape’? - the sloping low-ceilinged passage that leads down to the underworld:

Today you must go for a walk in the dark. Go in
Where the stream by the graveyard falls
Into the tunnel and hurries off hoarse with graffiti.
You will be hauling a brass-handled narrowboat,
Mounted with twin candelabra, containing
A poet who managed to drink himself dead,
With heroic commitment, at fifty-one.
Packed up with books and manuscripts and scotch,
In his box from the Co-op, a birthright of sorts.

Later in this poem, we get again, foregrounded here, the idea that poetry stops with death. (‘What need of poems in the dark?’) Sean O’Brien makes a good case for that depressing reality - or blessed release? - here:

... down here’s the speechless
History of everything and nothing,
Poetry’s contagious opposite.

An elegant and elegiac book then, but not particularly sinister, in spite of its subject matter. O’Brien has managed to imbue his vision of death and the afterworld with terrible beauty but also a wry sense of humour which refuses to be cowed by its surroundings. To read The Drowned Book cover to cover at one sitting may be a strange and discomforting experience, but it’s one which managed to produce a certain calm inspiration in this poet at least:

On the gathering waters that slide
To the mouth of the Tyne, where the world

Is beginning and ending:
Three lighthouses wearing the weather,
In each of them a table laid

With rosemary and rue,
So that the dead may sit at peace
And watch with us tonight.

*

You can find The Drowned Book online at Amazon.co.uk

Books Just Arrived

Having a little spare cash after putting down the required deposit and whatnot for our new tenancy - starting next week - I decided to treat myself to some new books.

Well, I say new, but only one of them is genuinely new and that's Common Prayer by Poetry Review editor, Fiona Sampson (Carcanet Books, just out).

Some are copies of poetry books I've had out on loan from the library and want to actually own, like Don Paterson's delicately written Orpheus (Faber, 2006) and Vicki Feaver's The Book of Blood (Cape, 2006).

Interestingly, The Book of Blood was one of a number of possible titles for my own second collection, which eventually became Boudicca & Co. Vicki Feaver got there first on this occasion, but since I consider Boudicca & Co. an inspired choice of title, there can be no hard feelings!

:wry grin:

Also in this category is Paul Farley's excellent Tramp in Flames.

Yet another book, Peter Dickinson's Changes, is not poetry at all, but science fantasy: a trilogy of short fantasy novels I loved in my teens, now published as one volume by US publisher Dell. Merlin re-awakens and 'changes' Britain back into the Dark Ages, a land where modern machines are considered the work of the devil and those who try to use them are treated as witches. I'm looking forward to re-acquainting myself with the Changes trilogy this summer - as a break from the deadly serious work of poetry!

That only leaves two other books: Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk (Faber, 2003) and Ian Duhig's The Lammas Hireling (Picador, also 2003). I've read neither of these before, though I have browsed Duhig's book in a branch of Waterstones, intrigued by the superb painting of a 'Hare' by Albrecht Durer on the cover, and put it down mentally on my list of books to be bought when I'd got enough in the bank. Me and hares ... suffice it to say, we go way back.

I haven't put links up for any of these, as I wouldn't have wanted to leave anyone out and there are rather too many for a quick blog entry. But I hope you google at least one or two of them, if you're interested in contemporary poetry, and maybe buy a few yourself. Unless you own them already, of course, in which case do leave a comment below to let me know your favourites or the most disappointing reads among those books mentioned here.

Packing up the house recently, I discovered that I own several hundred books of poetry published over the past few decades. I haven't managed to read them all, of course, though I've sampled most. Some I know intimately, and those are the books of poetry which have gone into my OPEN FIRST boxes during the packing process, the poems that sustain me both as a writer and as a person.

But it's an odd thing. The more contemporary poetry I read, the less I seem to know or really understand about poetry.

In that respect, at least, poetry is like the TARDIS in Doctor Who. It's bigger on the inside ...

Does the Male Muse exist?

Tomorrow morning, Tuesday 10th July, from 11.30am - 12.00 noon, you can catch My Male Muse on Radio 4. In this potentially controversial programme, "poet Clare Pollard dispels the popular female image of a muse. She argues that men can also be a source of beauty and inspiration, and contradicts poet Robert Graves, who famously claimed that the male muse doesn't exist."

The programme is produced by Clare Pollard and Tamysn Challenger. Other poets taking part will be Eva Salzman, Catherine Smith, Annie Freud, Melanie Challenger and Penelope Shuttle.

And as if the excitement of finding so many women poets on Radio 4 at once wasn't enough for one week, you can also listen to Fiona Sampson, poet and editor of Poetry Review, on Woman's Hour, Thursday July 12th between 10am and 10.45.

On that programme, Fiona will be reading from her brand-new poetry collection, just out from Carcanet, entitled Common Prayer. The programme will also feature discussions on the dreadful problem of endometriosis and 'how to moan without losing friends and alienating people'.

It could be worth my while to listen just for that last piece alone ...

Paraphernalia by Joanne Limburg (Bloodaxe, 2007): a first sharp look

I still haven't finished that Polley review. It's not some gleaming epic. I just can't seem to get my thoughts about Little Gods into any sort of coherent shape at the moment. It's probably the house move looming, all the tedious arrangements I have to tackle, such as actually finding us somewhere to live. Right now, anything that takes me too far away from my desk is a complete pain in the fundament. And moving house certainly comes into that category.

However, I received a copy of Joanne Limburg's second collection with Bloodaxe today. It's entitled Paraphernalia and is a handsome book with a cheery-looking cover painting by Liz Knox, a domestic scene featuring a kitchen table, but one suggestive of clutter and disarray. I'll probably look at it again in some depth next month, when perhaps hidden virtues may be revealed, but on a first read-through the book has proved disappointing enough to merit comment straightaway.

If this was a first book, I might be inclined to say, well, these poems are rough around the edges and a little dull, but she's not untalented and will no doubt improve. But Joanne Limburg started writing poetry at roughly the same time as I did, about ten years ago. And, to complicate matters, 'Paraphernalia' is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Which leaves me utterly astonished, when I can find lines of the following standard throughout this collection:

Every two hours,
20 by cup,
a little of me,
a note on a chart.

This is from a poem called Milk, about expressing milk to breast-feed a baby. It is by no means an unusual example of Joanne Limburg's work, nor is that topic unusual in a collection dominated by highly personal and domestic poems written so flatly and repetitively that I wonder whether the PBS were looking at the same book.

Perhaps it's intended to be light or comic verse. That might be possible, though I didn't personally find any of these poems funny. But I find it hard to believe that this is meant to be comic verse, as Limburg's poems - especially as you move further into the book - seem pervaded by an ever-deepening sense of malaise and disconnection from reality.

I take no pleasure in not being able to praise this book. Normally I would sidestep the review rather than write something very superficial, feeling unable to say anything positive about the book. Some of you may even be surprised to learn that I no longer possess the same taste for the jugular that got me into so much trouble back in the nineties.

But not wishing to be unkind doesn't mean I can't question the bestowing of a PBS Recommendation on a collection as weak as this. I am a member of the PBS and I don't expect to pay them a tidy sum of money every year only to be sent 'recommended' books through the post which I would put back on the shelf in a bookshop. And, after all, their website declares that 'The PBS offers the best new contemporary poetry to its members.'

Now, I'm perfectly open to hearing opposing points of view about 'Paraphernalia': indeed, I would welcome a debate on the book's merits. And I understand that all these PBS choices must be personal - that's a given in a highly subjective field like poetry - but I'd still be interested to know which selecting poets approved so highly of the poems from which the following extracts are taken, and precisely why:


One trip to the bin is all he needs
to put the lid on a season of chaos.
Now tell me that isn't better! It's better.

(final stanza of 'The Man Who Tidied His Wife's Handbag')

*

I have no mind for anything
but you and the gunge in the sink.

(from 'Nimbostratus')

*

Of course I could still change things - get off this sofa
and, you know, really do something about it.

(from 'Bubble')

*

O Night and Silence
why should I complain?

For though I am empty, and pale as veal,
surely your servants are good.

(from 'Psalm')

*

Despite our attempts
to resolve this matter
you fail to give us
the right response.

We are forced
to take action.

Now we are coming
to cut off your phone
to cut off your power
to cut off your water
to sever your every connection.

(from ATTENTION!, the title underlined and in capitals, a poem 'generated' by unpleasant letters the poet received by mistake from a mobile phone company, which were then apparently 'blend[ed] with a Cherokee "Spell to Destroy Life"' to produce this poem: I apologise for not being able to slightly indent the final lines as they appear in the book)

*

We shall not win security
by offering vermin security.

Sit back. Relax. Our marshals are trained
to handle cabin security.

Through the hissing fast flow teat
he's drinking in security.

(from "Security!", which repeats this end rhyme pattern for 9 couplets, possibly a 'ghazal', possibly not. If anyone knows the correct name for this poetic form, please leave a comment below.)

*

There was a husband - I suppose he left.
Now I'm poor, and sad, and home with mother.
I trudge between my bedroom, and the toilet,
don't even go downstairs until it's late.
I can't be bothered working for my 'A' Levels,
but if I fail again they'll keep the baby.

(from 'Late', a poem of 7 stanzas in the same voice, which is so consistently flat and prose-like that it makes me wonder why Limburg would choose to include it in her collection and why her editor didn't intervene. Perhaps they thought the drearily PC subject matter was enough to warrant its inclusion.)

*

Yes: I use this service.
No: no contact at all.
Always the minimum payment.
My signal is faint to poor.

Often: I think it's important.
My skin is slightly dry.
Whichever is the softer.
Citrus is better than pine.

(from 'Respondent': the conceit is explained by the title. It's an old trick, not particularly amusing, and although I hear and cheerily applaud many similar poems every month from open mic poets, it's hardly the standard of work I expect from a PBS Recommended Bloodaxe collection. Or is it?)

*

I'll stop there. I've had personal contact with Joanne Limburg, who is a perfectly delightful person, and I genuinely wish her all the very best with her writing. I am also convinced that many people will be fans of her work, otherwise she would not have got this far.

But when I read new poetry - particularly, perhaps, when I read other women poets, who have so much lost time to make up - I look for the hard, the ambitious, the unusual, the challenging, the witty, the powerful, the undaunted. So I am naturally disappointed when I find a collection by a woman poet of reasonable prominence which has been singled out for praise as Limburg's Paraphernalia has, yet which appears to possess little to recommend itself beyond a certain wacky modern sensibility and a taste for quirky, repetitively rhymed poems - I counted six poems in total which use the same couplet and end rhyme pattern throughout, a trick which soon palls. Where is the challenge in all this, where is the ambition?

Let me be clear. I am not looking to be needlessly unpleasant here, to trash Joanne Limburg's latest collection for my own purposes. When I get a new book like this, I turn to it eagerly, hoping to be excited and inspired. I desperately want to find strong mainstream women poets with whom I can identify and from whom I can learn. The fact that I'm still struggling to do so after ten years in poetry is one of the quiet everyday despairs of my life. So when I implore women poets like Joanne Limburg to be more inventive, more ambitious and more creatively independent in their poetry, I am also reminding myself of the gap between my own aspirations and the reality of my work.

Beautiful Scary Darkness: Tamar Yoseloff's 'Fetch' (Salt Publishing, 2007)

Some poetry collections seem to meander in several directions at once, a loose hotchpotch of styles. Others stick to a party line, eyes fixed on a particular prize, accolade or literary coterie. Then there are those rare poetry collections, like Tamar Yoseloff’s Fetch, which seem both artful and true to life’s variety; bundled tightly together in this handsome book from Salt, the poems feel as real and atmospheric as your own memories, as here when she describes foraging for 'Fungi':

The smell -
wet anorak, fusty books, disturbed dust
of long unopened doors -
like the basement of your childhood,
beautful scary darkness.

Fetch is Tamar Yoseloff’s third collection. Her first collection Sweetheart (Slow Dancer Press 1998) was a PBS Special Commendation and won the Aldeburgh Festival Prize. American-born, she lives in London and is a tutor for the Poetry School. No stranger to the technical side of poetry, then. Nor to the idea of leitmotifs, which she uses to great effect in this latest collection.

The odd-sounding title, Fetch, is variously defined by Yoseloff as a stratagem; a trick; an artifice; the double of a living person; a wraith. Correspondingly, there are five sequenced poems here entitled ‘Fetch’, which, along with a series of woodcuts by Linda Karshan, mark off five divisions in the book. All five poems are quite similar in form and tone, with an other worldly quality, a film noir sensibility that stops just short of the reveal.

This film noir shiver is compounded by the narrative voice, which acts like a voice-over at times, an inclination towards metanarrative that makes me think of a screenwriter at work on a manuscript; sitting alone, maybe slumped over a desk in the early hours of the morning, she sends her character out into this darker world of the imagination, masterminding her every move, following the action as though with a hidden camera.

So the 'Fetch' sequence becomes a sort of poetic Chinatown, a world reeking of fear, suspense and erotic tension, yet highly aware of itself as it operates within that genre. Eventually, in a sinister fashion, the female ‘fetch’ of these poems begins to subtly take on the narrator’s appearance, to disobey orders, do her own thing, threatening to leave her creator behind.

My overriding impression when reading Fetch was a contradictory one of delicate craft combined with an over-saturation of the senses. Not an easy book to read in one sitting, but certainly one to return to, enjoying the smooth poetry of the middle sections, discovering dark corners and previously unseen footage.

Yoseloff’s lyrical gift comes to the fore primarily in strong, sensuous poems like ’Tiger‘, ’Vaporetto in Winter’, and the painterly ‘Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals’. One short poem, 'Spring', is written ‘after Barbara Hepworth’, the talented British sculptor and artist who made her home at St. Ives in Cornwall. In 'Spring', the poet points to the complications of modern life, where ‘We pull strings/taut, construct ourselves, little puzzles’ - which sounds very like her poetry, with its intricately built walls and pyramids of sound and image. They are not forbidding places, though. Tamar Yoseloff is always inviting the reader beyond her artifical constructs into an interior where life continues just out of sight, real and intimate, yet still suggestive of some cinematic mise-en-scene, as here in the final lines of 'St. Ives':

From this window: curtains
partly drawn, the coffee in the mugs
stone cold, the tiny union jack
the only colours in the world.*

This restless connection with the visual - both filmic and from the world of art - is echoed throughout the collection. First, there is Tamar Yoseloff’s ability to pick out all this delicate imagery in painstakingly selected and placed words. Then there’s the matter of her framing references - the titles of these poems - which often reveal her inspirations. In ‘Portrait of a Couple Looking at a Turner Landscape’, she plays with structural echoes as she describes the damp-haired couple who ‘stand, not quite touching’, shifting the left-hand margin to accommodate ‘vast plains of emerald and gold’ in the painting, employing the theatrical aside of parenthesis, her lines held in exquisite tension until the final climactic ‘the sky opens and it pours’.

Elsewhere, a poem called ‘Marks’ gets full ones from me. Reminiscent of Pauline Stainer’s best work, this long sequence glows with medieval-like fragments of spiritual poetry - ‘angel of dust’, ‘the ice breaks/a song in the trees’, ‘Blade of grass through snow’, ‘hieroglyphs/in a field’, ‘a little morse of blood’, ‘delicate crevice of ice’. The entire poem feels modernist in its experimental form, yet almost romantic in tone, her voice ‘just audible/between broken frequencies’.

Tamar Yoseloff manages to yoke both these traditions here, keeping her hands light on the reins. She also writes well of the hard-edged realities of modern life - bus journeys in the dark, the news ‘full of war again’, and impersonal foreign trips, where

He stalks the wilds of the duvet
in this nil-star hotel room,
just a double bed and a bidet.

Then, without losing credibility, she speaks in a more Hughesian tongue of ‘the fox crying to no one,’ ‘the invisible sun within us’, and turns a fairy tale eye on the cautionary poem about ‘Fungi’ with which I began this review:

They poke
their tiny heads through dirt,
explorers from another age, and find
a world glassy with rain, a forest
thick with leaf mulch.

This combination of sharp urban ennui with sensuous lyricism, deployed in a language steeped in rich imagery, makes Tamar Yoseloff a poetic force to be reckoned with. Worth buying if you don't already own it.

***

Remember, you can invest in poetry by buying Fetch direct from Salt Publishing here.

*Still unable to manage the HTML for inset lines, I'm afraid. This line should start above the last 'f' in coffee.

The Best Man That Ever Was, a debut poetry collection from Annie Freud

I recently bought The Best Man That Ever Was, Annie Freud's debut poetry collection from Picador, and have been reading it. Reading poetry collections takes time, and I don't imagine that one - or even two - fairly rapid read-throughs is enough for anyone to comment wisely on a poet or their work. But I'm going to attempt to comment to some extent on what I've read, in particular the title poem, and you'll have to forgive any fuzziness now or subsequent shifts in opinion as I come back to the book in the future.

First off, The Best Man That Ever Was is an intelligent collection, darkly humorous, loaded with grand ideas and impressive metaphors, written by a poet with oodles of raw talent and a sure ear.

But there are flaws here, and most of them are connected, in my opinion, to Annie Freud’s decision to sidestep the sticky issue of gender in poetry by writing so frequently over the shoulder of a man (i.e. ‘He’ does this or that, rather than ‘She’) or actually in the first person voice of a man. Which is problematic in itself, because it raises another sticky issue for poets, which is authenticity.

You could argue that it’s in the nature of things for a poet to be a ventriloquist, speaking in the voice of an object or another person, regardless of gender. But you could also argue that when it becomes noticeable it’s no longer in the nature of things, but is a stylistic nervous tic.

Which brings me to the question of style.

‘One of the most startlingly original poets to have emerged in recent years’ declares the Picador-generated blurb on the back cover of this handsome book.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself struck by these - often very witty - poems’ similarity to work by, say, John Stammers, Roddy Lumsden, and other London-based poets tonally influenced by - among others, agreed - the same Frank O'Hara/New York School tradition. There's also more than a touch of well-known American poet Sharon Olds here, with the long, loose-limbed rhythms of some poems and their peculiarly detailed note of intimacy, the psychological touch [though often veering away into a blokeish humour, as though Freud flirts with but doesn't want to get too close to any kind of female love poem tradition, even one as densely textured and metaphysical as Olds'].

This is a poetry with two distinct moods, neither of them unusual in contemporary poetry. It either undulates, like the I Claudius-style snake on the cover, in syllabic-heavy American-influenced lines dripping with semi-colons and subordinate clauses, or trots in sharp urban stanzas like this:

Fucking great to have done my bird
and get the heat of the sun on my neck,
no longer to hear the hooter’s howl
and live in fear of the cunting screws.

Which is where you may spot the problem I mentioned earlier: Annie Freud’s liking for poems written from a man’s point of view.

I can see that writing poetry in the voice of a man can be liberating for a woman, allowing her to say all sorts of things she might feel uncomfortable with as a woman and to use a few techniques native to male poets, like the snide or brutal closing one-liner, blowing right down the British line from Simon Armitage, which makes a frequent appearance in this collection.

It’s a fabulous trick if you’re trying to achieve humour – and these poems can be very funny – but it’s a trick that’s right there on the surface of the work, not concealed by the magician, as here in the final statement of The Maskmaker of Wanstead, its deliberately empty 'You ain't seen nothing yet.'

Authenticity. It’s not so much that we have to consider biography whenever we read, relating each poem back to the poet’s life. It’s more that the poem must seem authentic in the reading, that it must strike the reader as being ‘true’.

Indications for me that a poem is ‘true’ in this sense may include a raised heart beat, a sharp intake of breath, the urge to re-read those particular lines, and a strong desire to instantly rush off and write something myself, because the spark of authenticity ignites something in me as a writer, a sort of internal wick that’s always there, dry tinder, waiting to catch light.

Ambition is another word on the list of things I tend to look for first in a poem, including my own work. I constantly find myself writing unambitious poems, perhaps having been influenced by others in the same tradition to the extent where I don't always notice how a poem is going, the way it's shaping up, until it's too late to do anything about it.

There can be a randomness about this, but I see no other reason for wanting to write poetry than to leave behind work that will last. Anything less and we might as well give up the attempt and work a supermarket check-out. Or write fiction.

Annie Freud's The Best Man That Ever Was announces its ambition up-front with its title. Or does it?

Two things here: ‘best’ and ‘man’, the first being obvious in its claim, the second striking at first glance, gender-wise. But is Freud the ‘best man that ever was’, you may wonder, picking up the book in Waterstones? Or is this the inverse of female poetic ambition, tugging a forelock to the male tradition in the hope that it treats you kindly?

As though to completely throw out of kilter this initial impression, the title poem turns out to be one of the most complex and interesting pieces in the book. Like the collection itself, it plays with the reader, suggesting one interpretation, then unexpectedly revealing another, and yet another. It's also unusual for its content: 'The Best Man That Ever Was' tells the story of a woman who is beaten - or enjoys being beaten - in a ritualistic and theatrical manner by a man in a hotel room. **

Five stanzas of twelve lines, alternate lines slightly indented as though to create a see-sawing, swaying or dancing motion for the eye, each stanza recognisably different in tone. The first two stanzas left me confused, forced to retrace the earlier lines to find the thread I suspected I’d missed.

Having regained some sort of stability in the middle section, I then found the poem pulling me on compulsively to the end, by which time I felt a prurient interest in the interior world of the poem, its hinterland, its past, its truth or otherwise, not to mention intrigued and a little flustered by the content of the poem.

Here's the middle section, the rhythmic core of the poem, with no hesitations and the narrative voice superbly poised:

And having washed and dried his hands with care
and filled our flutes like any ordinary man,
the night's first task would come into his mind.
He'd bark his hoarse articulate command
and down I'd bend across the ornamented desk,
my mouth level with the inkstand's claws,
my cheek flat against the blotter; I'd lift my skirts,
slip down my panties and sob for him
with every blow.

[I can't do the inset for alternate lines here: anyone with the correct HTML please email me!]

I loved this particular stanza, could feel the authenticity zinging off it. Yet after the poem had finished I still felt confused, questioning the logistics of the poem's voice and set-up, like someone who walks out of the cinema after watching a film and feels unable to stop going over and over the plot and its closing moments in her mind. Re-writing, perhaps, or just trying to come to a better understanding.

In this title poem, Freud’s tone - and this applies to many of the longer poems in the book - is beautifully managed and maintained. Like a formal garden. Indeed, there’s something Edwardian about 'The Best Man That Ever Was', its narrative voice old-fashioned in an ironic and highly self-conscious way. We have the stilted self-importance of the wealthy man who beats his mistress (or wife, or prostitute, I’m not quite sure which) with birch twigs in a grand hotel, referring to the birch twigs as -

A Thing of Nature, so he said, so fine, so pure.
He’d turn away and smooth his thinning hair,
lost as he was in some vision of grandeur

- at that moment complementing the tone of the woman being beaten, in other places contrasting with it.

The narrator's voice sounds slightly deranged at the beginning of the poem, off-balance, with truncated clauses cluttering the first stanza. The narrative develops quite suddenly into eloquence after that, imbued with a sense of calm resignation about the woman’s ritual beating and its effect on both of them, Freud’s sentences lengthier and more urbane as the poem reaches its middle section.

Then her manner changes abruptly at the end, becoming Plath-like in its declamatory rhetoric, short clauses falling over themselves to reach the finishing tape, the tone unexpectedly triumphant as she celebrates rather than decries her oppressor/lover:

It’s over. But it is still good to arrive at a fine hotel
and reward the major-domo’s gruff punctilio
with a smile and a tip and let the bellboys slap my arse
and remember him, the man who thrashed me,
fed me, adored me. He was the best man that ever was.
He was my assassin of the world.

I can hear the true voice of the woman here. The throwaway finality of ‘It’s over’, the bite in these shortened syllables, the hint of barely controlled hysteria behind ‘assassin’.

Submission. Domination. The cruel, complicated, often unfathomable mental and sexual games that men and women play together. The see-sawing motion of the alternately indented lines: first one, then another. The dual face of desire. These are the things which inform the title poem.

And perhaps the deliberate textual confusions sprinkled throughout 'The Best Man That Ever Was' - who’s speaking? who is the best man? who’s doing what to whom, and why? - reflect the playful and duplicitous nature of Annie Freud’s first book. Another word to describe this might be artful. Which is to say - authentic, good. Which is to say there may be hope yet for my inadequate reading of this complex, multi-layered, tongue-in-cheek collection, and plenty more for Annie Freud herself.

But I still wish she hadn’t written quite so many poems from the point of view of a man ...

*
*I had to look up ‘velleity’. It means 1. a low degree of volition not conducive to action, and 2. a slight wish or inclination (Shorter Oxford English). I’m not sure how that fits into its context here.

**I'm grateful to Roddy Lumsden here for letting me know that the man mentioned in this title poem is Hitler. This was not at all clear to me from the title or content, but may be apparent to others. I think, in instances like these where vital contextual material is not immediately obvious in the poem itself, notes should be supplied at the back of the book, or a subtitle given to elucidate the poem. Either that or the poem should be written in such a way that it can stand alone, without notes or subtitles, otherwise alternative readings to the one intended by the poet are inevitable and must be accepted as such.

The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007), Annie Freud

Too Much Wine & Too Little Money

Too Much Wine, M'Lud

I went to a London party thrown by a poet last night, something I don't think I've ever done before. I anticipated meeting other poets there, as well as 'normal folk' and I was not disappointed. We had the usual smoky delicious offerings from the barbecue, fabulous warm dry weather, and far too much wine - I think everyone who came brought a bottle, including myself, and we did not stint ourselves in the drinking of it. (At least, I certainly didn't, and my fragile head this morning is testimony to that sad lack of forebearance. But I almost never go to parties, so I guess I'm allowed.) And the bulk of the conversations that I rolled into and over were about poetry, poetry publishing and other poets. In reverse order.

It was great fun, though I said some things I shouldn't have said - nothing new there, then! - and ought to have been led gently away by my husband after the first bottle had been consumed. But alas, that didn't happen, and I was only lured away in the end by the promise of chocolate on the long drive home ...

Poetry Book Society & the Rising Cost of Poetry

In a rush of extravagance, I recently re-joined the Poetry Book Society after not having been a member for nearly ten years. Today I received my first posting from them: a Selected by Geoffrey Hill, absolutely free, which was the tempting offer that had encouraged me to re-join, a £10 book voucher to be used when buying more poetry from them in the future, and this quarter's Choice, which is Sarah Maguire's new collection The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto, £9.00), officially published on Thursday June 7th.

The new Maguire book looks intriguing, so I shall be trawling through that later this week (along with a whole deskload of new poetry that I've been buying recently, most of it as cheaply as possible, as poetry is steadily becoming more expensive) and will report back at some point on that acquisition. I shall also enjoy sitting down to admire Hill's Mercian Hymns at leisure, which I've only read in passing before. His Selected is from Penguin and costs £8.99.

But talking of the cost of poetry, at nearly 300 pages, I have to question why Geoffrey Hill's hefty and rather beautifully designed Selected is a penny cheaper than Sarah Maguire's new collection from Chatto, which may also have a beautiful cover but only weighs in at 72 pages.

No doubt it's distasteful of me to question the rising cost of poetry, or to make these potentially odious comparisons between book prices, but as I said to someone at that party last night - on the topic of whether or not it's in bad taste to accept reviewing work if you aren't able to praise the book in question to the skies - I don't have the luxury of being able to ignore such delicate matters and just stump up for the poetry or turn down an offer of paid work, on principle.

I do worry though that poetry is beginning to be priced out of the range of the average reader's pocket (if there is such a thing as an average poetry reader). Popular novels can be found at knockdown prices in supermarkets everywhere, following the demise of the Net Book Agreement, and most new non-fiction can be found online at reasonable prices via Amazon et al. But supermarkets don't stock poetry and if you buy it online at a discount, it usually means either the publisher or the poet is going to suffer for your gain.

As an example of this, the Sarah Maguire 'Choice' from the Poetry Book Society is available currently on Amazon at only £7.20, a saving of 20% on the retail price. And the collection's not even officially out yet! That price will, I'm sure, drop even further once it's been released, and after a few years, like most collections of poetry that have been kicking around the scene for a while, it will be available for only a few pounds at the most. Some poetry collections from earlier than 2000 are now available online for as little as a few pence, plus p&p.

I want to 'do the right thing' in this context and make sure money gets circulated round the poetry scene, which basically means back to the people who wrote the damned stuff in the first place. But with recommended retail prices reaching up to and beyond the £10 mark for most new collections - and often a great deal more for the larger Selected and Collected editions - that desire to do the right thing by poets has to compete with the very real fear of not being able to pay my own household bills if I buy too much undiscounted poetry in any given month.

Jen Hadfield & Almanacs

I've been having some email conversations recently with a poet called Jen Hadfield, who lives some 600-odd miles north of London in the remote Shetland Islands, so I thought I'd post something up here about her work as she is only just beginning to make her mark on the UK poetry scene.

Jen Hadfield was born in Chesire in 1978 and is half-Canadian, as I understand it. She's published one full-length poetry collection with Bloodaxe, entitled 'Almanacs' (you can buy it here on amazon.co.uk), and is also an artist - click here to find some of her work at the Peedie Gallery, Orkney. For samples of Jen Hadfield's poetry and more about her life and various preoccupations, you can visit her website Rogue Seeds.



Her poetry is both delicate and muscular, which is an odd combination; I think it's the form which seems delicate to me, and the language which comes across as muscular. Living in the Shetlands, Jen is obviously influenced by that rugged scenery in terms of language and imagery, yet the forms she chooses tend to dance around, refusing to be pinned down and often inhabiting odd parts of the page, reminding me of some avant-garde work I've read, though rarely as opaque!

In spite of the rural Scottish connection, these are not poems about wild flowers and seascapes, although those can be found in her work, naturally enough. Instead, there's a sophisticated world-trekking mindset behind her poetry which requires a far larger - and wilder - canvas than the simple mainstream lyric, and the characters she adopts in her narrative-style poetry suggest an eccentric novelist or playwright working in a tighter form. Which is not to say that poetry isn't her form, just that she appears to be doing something very different and more ambitious with it in comparison to many of her peers. Basically, Jen Hadfield's first collection of poetry is Gordon Wardman's Hank meets Alan Warner's Morvern Callar meets High Plains Drifter. Confused? Well, that's what Google is for.

She's at work now on her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, amongst other things. Definitely one to watch ...