Man Lit Fest – Fleur Adcock, CNZM, OBE (1934 - )

This is the second week of the Manchester Literary Festival – my attendance at events is determined more by my diary than by my choice of poets, but last night I went to Fleur Adcock’s reading in the dinosaur room at the Manchester Museum: disco lights, fossilised trees, wall charts stratifying time into geological epochs – Devonian, Lower and Upper Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. I learnt the timeline while I waited for the reading to begin.

The venue had been chosen to match the title of Fleur’s latest collection Dragon Talk (Bloodaxe 2010), and indeed Fleur stood under the fossilised skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, dwarfed by its hugeness. The acoustic was poor and the distraction posed by the T Rex immense. Fleur reads well, but in that huge marble hall her poems rattled out like a handful of jacks.

She could not compete with the dinosaur. Its skimpy forelegs framed her face, its huge skull loomed down on her; I found myself counting its teeth and the girl behind me said the beast was spooking her. The room was cold too, too cold to linger in and I left early.

The poems took us from her childhood in New Zealand and through her teens back in postwar Wellington. Some were based on her father’s war time letters to his parents, but she ended with poems about her grandchildren. All of them teasing and sardonic, well suited to the quirkiness of the dinosaur hall – I’m sure she’ll pull a poem out of T Rex’s mouth!

Seamus Heaney (1939 - )

Last weekend a friend who is not much into poetry asked me if I knew Heaney’s poem Thatcher. She’d read it while a student back in the 80’s but no longer knew where to find it. I located it quickly enough, in Door into the Dark (Faber 1969) and left her to read it while I finished cooking lunch. Door into the Dark, whose title is taken from the opening line of The Forge is for me one of the best of Heaney’s books, full of strong visual imagery that somehow makes you think:


And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean in their own shapes’
Water and ground in their own extremity.


(from The Peninsula)

Rereading Door into the Dark after my friend had gone home reminded me that I still haven’t finished  Stepping Stones (Faber 2010), Dennis O’Driscoll’s long series of interviews with Heaney. I’ve been struggling with it since March this year, I think because it lacks what most attracts me to Heaney’s work – his richly visual lexicon:


All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag.
He'd arrive with it, disappear to the room
And by the time he'd reappear to wash
Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his
In the scullery basin, its lined insides
(The colour of a spaniel's inside lug)

(from Out of The Bag)

I will finish it some day, but the poetry wins hands down!

Katharine Towers (1961 – )

Maybe poetry doesn’t sell because it’s not given a chance.

Katherine Towers’ The Floating Man (Picador Poetry 2010) was recommended to me by Jacob Polley, who I’d met on a train travelling back from the East Riding Literature Festival. About a month later it was reviewed in the PBS newsletter and on the strength of those two recommendations I was looking out for it. I found it in a remainder bookshop. While I won’t quibble at getting any book for half price, I was shocked and disappointed at its speedy consignment to the bin – why would any poet want to get published if one’s shelf life amounts to only a few weeks?

The Floating Man is Towers’ debut. She gives us small, finely crafted poems about birds and woods and the sea. The blurb says the book is ‘haunted by music’, but I think it’s more that Towers has an ear for sound; starlings tilt and creak, arctic terns are all jitter and fret. Flight and weightlessness stand as metaphor for shifts in relationships between two people, or for the self with the self.

Split open my breast and you’ll find
the tangled threads of a cormorant’s nest.
For years I mistook it for my heart.


One day I felt the scuffle and scrape
of a long salt wing beating.
Bruinhilda

Towers writes beautiful poetry. I will be buying her next volume.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

In memory of my father

My father died a month ago. He was 86. It is 54 years since he read me The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. My father enjoyed reading to children and he read well, a skill which he passed on to me. I don’t remember which edition we read from; I do remember being gripped by the vividness of the imagery the words conjured up in my minds’ eye – a vividness that has prompted the many illustrated editions of Coleridge's story of the ancient mariner.

My father would pause every now and then, sometimes to explain to my six year old self what was going on, sometimes to enable us both to savour the poetry:

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice mast high came floating by
As green as emerald.


This passage is picked up in the frontispiece to the 1994 Folio Society edition, which is beautifully bound in plum silk moiré, printed on Albatross Wove of pale azure iand llustrated with wood engravings by Garrick Palmer. I treasure it.

In his  introduction to the Folio edition Richard Holmes suggests three possible lines of interpretation of the poem: religious or sacramental; aesthetic; or a ‘Green Parable’ - a  vision of how nature can revenge herself. To me it’s a children’s story, and in the way of all good children’s stories, one which speaks most profoundly to adults.

Without my father’s introduction to Coleridge, would I have come to poetry? Yes. But it was a brilliant introduction. Thank you dad.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Rilke has been with me since childhood. A school trip took me to Vienna to stay in a boarding school housed in a vast imposing building that once had garrisoned the Emperor Franz Joseph's officers. The Austrian pupils with whom we were billeted were two years older than us, culturally sophisticated and eager to show us around Vienna. We toured palaces and art galleries and walked in the Vienna Woods. We visited the houses where Beethoven and Mozart had lodged – decades later I was overjoyed to find a CD of Andreas Schiff playing a selection of Mozart piano sonatas on the same piano that I had seen as a teenager. I went to my first opera, Verdi’s Don Carlos. I was also homesick and my Austrian friend comforted me with Rilke, two slim volumes of his verse that alas, I no longer have.

Rilke: Between Roots Selected Poems rendered from the German by Rika Lesser (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, Princeton University Press, 1989) is now sadly out of print. I don’t know where or why I bought it, probably in the years of my return to poetry and in particular, to Rilke. It’s beautiful. In it Lesser translates a selection of Rilke work dating from 1904 to 1926.

The volume begins with Orpheus. Eurydidice. Hermes. The poem tells of Orpheus’s return from the underworld, Eurydice and Hermes walking behind him – and he may not look back:

While sight ran before him like a dog,
turned back, again and again stood
distant and waiting at the path’s next turn –

Orpheus. Eurydidice. Hermes
Lesser includes poems on some of Rilke’s favourite themes: Orpheus, roses, tears, but also an untitled poem Rilke wrote when he was dying a slow painful death from leukaemia:

Come, you last thing I recognise,
Unendurable pain in the body’s web:
Just as I burned in spirit, see, I burn
in you; the wood has long resisted
joining its voices to your flame
but now I feel you and burn in you

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

I was introduced to the work of Elizabeth Bishop about twenty years ago by Michael Longley, who was tutoring an Arvon course on lyric poetry. We read The Fish and I subsequently bought Bishop’s Complete Poems (Chatto Poetry). The jacket illustration of my 1991 edition is a painting called A Wall, Nassau, by Winslow Homer, which reminds beautifully of Bishop’s own seascapes.

Bishop wrote little, publishing only 101 poems during her lifetime, but the respect in which she is held far exceeds her output, and justly so, for each poem is crafted to perfection. She has an eye for detail and a gentle sense of humour. She is a poet whose work I read often, as evidenced by the coffee stains on favourite poems: At the Fishhouses and The Moose, the latter with its incomparable opening stanza:

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,


Bishop’s poems have an emotional tone similar to the paintings of Edward Hopper, spare and disciplined but lit with a kind of quirky nostalgia. Both gained inspiration from travel. In Questions of Travel Bishop wrote:

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty . . .

while Hopper once said:

'To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're travelling.'

Women Poets - British writers

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets –eleven British Writers, edited by Jeni Couzyn, was one of my earliest purchases. Two decades on it seems incredible that of the eleven I knew only Plath and Raine.

Generally speaking I avoid anthologies – I prefer to make my own selection of poems – but this is a book I often revisit. A fine introduction deals with the treatment of women poets by male editors and of the compromises women make – or fail to make – in order to write poetry. A brief biography (sometimes written by the poet herself) precedes a generous selection of the work of each of the chosen poets, and I am grateful to Couzyn for introducing me to some very fine writing, including what has become one of my favourite poems:


Then as he sang

it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
                 came into my roots
                                      out of the earth,
                 into my bark
                                      out of the air,
                 into the pores of my greenest shoots
                                                 gently as dew

A Tree Telling of Orpheus, Denise Levertov