Ellis Gill - for love of poetry

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

2010-10-20T08:35:00.000+01:00

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 - )

2010-09-20T11:04:00.000+01:00

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 – )

2010-09-13T10:31:00.000+01:00

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)

2010-08-15T21:24:00.000+01:00

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)

2010-07-05T07:04:00.000+01:00

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)

2010-06-15T22:42:00.000+01:00

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

2010-05-31T22:40:00.000+01:00

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

Christopher Smart (1722-1771)

2010-05-17T10:11:00.000+01:00

Reading Bedlam, London and its Mad (Catherine Arnold, Pocket Books, 2009) I came across a new slant on Kit Smart and his cat. As to Smart, Arnold writes:

The poet Kit Smart, a fellow of Pembroke College and a chronic alcoholic, periodically ‘dried out’ at Bethlem, courtesy of his college. Smart was addicted to ‘hartshorn’ (a naturally occurring stimulant also enjoyed by J.M.W. Turner and possibly the inspiration for those incredible sunsets). He was also a religious fanatic – it was said that he prayed so loudly he drove his neighbours to distraction and had to be committed for his own safety, although Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was prepared to overlook this. ‘His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him, and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.’

And as to the cat, London's madhouses were rife with vermin, so a feline presence was needed to keep down the rats.

Siud an t-Eilean – There Goes the Island

2010-05-10T21:35:00.001+01:00

Bookshops in far away places often yield poetry which speaks of the universality of that particular community:

The Bier

Arnish light on my right,
Muirneag cloaked,
A coverlet on the Barvas Hills,
A shroud on Hol,
We grasp the bier-poles,
Rocking and plunging on the surface of memory.

Derick Thomson

Siud an t-Eilean (Acair ltd, 1993, edited by Ian Stephen) is an anthology of Gaelic and English poetry from Lewis and Harris. The book also reproduces 24 black and white photographs of local life. I bought it in Stornoway during a brief visit there. I had gone to Lewis to see Callanish, but I was achingly lonely – a woman travelling alone was cause not for hospitality, but for comment – and after a couple of days I was glad to get back to Skye.

The poems are by poets born on the island or who live there or have family background there, or have visited then been moved to speak by the landscape and community that is “The Long Island”. Some poets are well known – Iain Crichton Smith, Norman McCaig – others unknown. I like best the poems about the island itself:

I also wane
in the blood’s neap tide
in my sight the grey geese
that arose from my mind
five lances of them
slanting and turning
drawing their history
rounding out their fate-poem
on the calm slopes of the sky

From Late Autumn, John Murray

Jon Glover (1943 - ) Our Photographs

2010-04-26T07:10:00.005+01:00

Our Photographs (Carcanet, 1986) was recommended to me by a close friend who is also a friend of the poet. I have read the poems so many times the book is falling apart – but is sadly now out of print.

It was Glover’s first book and concerns a 19th century man who leaves his home on a Scottish island for the United States. Glover’s own note, which appears at the end of the sequence, names the speaker of each poem – the exile, the ferry boat captain, the landlord, a dispossessed villager – but such identification is scarcely needed. Those the exile left behind faced eviction, for this was the time of the second and most brutal phase of the Highland clearances, when not only a people but the Gaelic tongue too was repressed.

The poems are informed by two separate collections of photographs, one from 19th century Wisconsin, and the other from 20th century St Kilda, taken just before the community there was moved out and re-settled. It is the photographic quality of the poems which attracts me; that ,and the memories they evoke of the Western Isles:

Above the village, the walled graves.
To go up to that ceremony,
Climbing into silence
Was no division. That mile stamped
A God’s dream over the land.
Our hill held in each stone mark
The words we left between peat and root.

On the ship: memories

The clearest voice is that of the exile. Our sense of him changes as he himself changes; he remains an islander but becomes a citizen. And in the penultimate poem Evening in a Museum, whose ancestors are being invoked, those of the islander or of the Native American?

In the evolutionary sequence
this polished room honours the suave,
tongueless shells –

the uncashable, spell-binding
legacies of which ancestors?

Evening in a Museum

http://www.jonglover.co.uk

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

2010-04-18T08:17:00.004+01:00

Northern England is full of rocks. People like to quarry them, to walk over them, to clamber down into them, to climb them, to touch them – climbers can be surprisingly lyrical about how rocks feel under the hand. I like to listen to their differing qualities of silence: shale has a sharp brittle silence: its echoes spook. Limestone silence is warm and hollow, as soft and wrap-around as an old coat. Granite whispers of winds and oceans. Where, I wondered was the poetry that spoke of the practicalities and geology of rock, of its silence and extraordinary presence?

Coleridge, a connoisseur of water, wrties well of rock, but in his notebooks, not his poems. Wordsworth sits or lies on rocks, but seemingly without touching them. Snyder – ah Snyder, now he does live rock and water!

Creek boulders show the flow-wear lines
in shapes the same
as running blood
carves in the heart’s main
valve,

Straight Creek – Great Burn

But what I was looking for was poet and rock meeting in solitude and uncovering each other’s myths. I found it in The Stones Of Chile (Pablo Neruda, translated by Dennis Maloney, White Pine Press, 1986). In his introduction to the book Neruda wrote:

. . . the book, adorned with the portraits of creatures of stone, is a conversation I open to all the poets of the earth, so that it may be continued by all in order to encounter the secret of stone and life.

The poems within are desolate and stony, the rocks silent but eloquent. Neruda lived in Isla Negra, a coastal area of Chile, from 1939 to his death in 1973, but with long periods of absence in exile. Neruda hears the stones with his eyes, his fingers and his heart:

I touch the stubborn spirit of rock,
its rampart pounds in the brine,
and my flaws remain here,
wrinkled essence that rose
from the depths to my soul,
and stone I was, stone I will be.

House

A Murmur in the Trees – Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

2010-04-05T08:50:00.010+01:00

My introduction to the work of Emily Dickinson came by way of hearing Michael Longley read his own eponymous poem, which begins:

Emily Dickinson, I think of you
Wakening early each morning to write,
Dressing with care for the act of poetry
There followed a brief discussion of Dickinson and her subsequent influence on American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent most of her life, much of it as a virtual recluse in her father’s house. There she composed over seventeen hundred poems, only a handful of which were published in her lifetime.

I sought out an edition of her poems, but I didn’t buy it – Dickinson is an acquired taste, and at that time I didn’t share her poetic preoccupations. Some time later a friend whose literary tastes I respect encouraged me to try again. Dickinson, who had studied botany from the age of nine, grew up to become a keen gardener, and I found a kinship with the poems that draw on her garden – daffodils and bobolinks, clover and robins. I found her religious pre-occupations harder to appreciate – and still do.
Charmed as much by the illustrations as by the choice of poems, about ten years ago I bought A Murmur in the Trees, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Selected and Illustrated by Ferris Cook (Bullfinch Press 1998, now part of the Hachette Group) as a Christmas present for an American friend. I'd also wanted the book for myself, but at the time there was only one on the shelf, so it was with great pleasure that I recently found a near pristine copy in one of Chester’s second hand bookshops. Ferris Cook is a New York artist whose exquisite images considerably enhance Dickinson’s verses.
I think Emily would have liked all of Ferris Cook’s illustrations, but especially the flippant fly so real I’ve once or twice tried to brush it off the page, and the whippoorwill nestling below its own poem:
A feather from the Whippoorwill
That everlasting – sings!
Whose galleries – are sunrise –
Whose opera – the Springs –
And although the poet described herself as wren-like, I see a resemblance between Emily’s portrait and that of the long-eared owl that gazes out from the book’s frontispiece.

Links:

http://www.ferriscook.com/
http://www.emilydickinson.org/
www.hachettebookgroup.com/publishing_little-brown-and-company.aspx

Buddhist poetry – Ryokan (1758?-1831)

2010-03-28T20:59:00.004+01:00

The olive green cover of One Robe, One Bowl, the Zen Poetry of Ryokan (translated by John Stevens, Weatherhill, 1989 - Weatherhill is now part of Shamabala) has faded to an odd shade of blue. Its pages bear the traces of coffee stains and biscuit crumbs. It's a much-travelled book, having accompanied me around the world in the inside pocket of a suitcase. It is still a favourite travelling companion.

It was given me in 1993 by a man I loved. He was warm, exciting, passionate – but also bumptious and greedy. He, like me, was studying Buddhism. He wooed me with books and because he’d lived for a while in Japan one of the first was One Robe, One Bowl.

Buddhism and poetry are inseparable. Mushin the mind free of contrivance, and mujo, the impermanence of all things are the essence of Buddhist teachings. What remains is a riveting place to be and fertile ground for poetry. Ryokan was a hermit monk of the restrained Soto Zen School which was brought to Japan in the 12th century. Just like his poems, Ryokan was gentle, respectful and eccentric:

A thief has stolen my zafu and futon.
Why did he break into my hermitage? The door is
never locked.

Ryokan wrote over a thousand poems, most about his daily life: begging for food in the rain; playing ball with the village children; winter nights spent alone in his hermit's hut. John Stevens's fresh, colloquial translation gives the reader a representative selection of Ryokan’s verse in both the Japanese and Chinese forms.

One Robe, One Bowl is a perfect introduction to Japanese poetry.

We see only a straw hat and raincoat
but still the scarecrow
Does his job.

A Celebration of Lynette Roberts (1909-1995)

2010-03-21T22:08:00.006Z

This past week I have been to two poetry events in Manchester city centre - the inaugural meeting of ‘pass on-a-poem’ passonapoem and an event celebrating the work of Lynette Roberts. I’m pleased ‘pass on-a-poem’ has come to Manchester, but I had to leave early, so stayed only for the first few readings – Bishop, Hopkins, Heaney, Masefield and Wormser.

Two days later the Central Library http://manchesterlitlist.blogspot.com/ hosted a celebration of the work of the Argentine-born Welsh writer Lynette Roberts. This was a treat, not least because I discovered that during the 1930s Roberts roomed in London’s Fitzrovia – and The Wheatsheaf and The Newman Arms, where Roberts used to meet up with Dylan Thomas, are two of my favourite London pubs.

Patrick McGuinness, Robert's editor at Carcanet, introduced her work and read a couple of poems, then chatted to Lynette’s daughter Angharad Rhys, god-daughter of T.S.Eliot.

McGuinness has the rare of knack of presuming no prior knowledge without condescending (essential in my case as I’m embarrassed to say I had not come across Roberts before). An informative, enjoyable and friendly event arranged by Manchester Libraries in association with Carcanet. I bought Roberts’s Collected Poems and her Diaries, Letters and Recollections, both edited by Patrick McGuiness. Much to enjoy here; Lamentation is a poem that brings together the loss of cattle in an air raid and the loss of a child through miscarriage:

O the salt loss of life
Her lovely green wings
The emptiness of crib
And big stare of night.

The blurb is right; Roberts is ‘an original and haunting poet’. I have always been slightly disappointed with Dylan Thomas - perhaps it was Roberts I was seeking.

Teaching poetry – Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

2010-03-15T11:58:00.007Z

Hopkins has been on my shelves since I was twelve or thirteen. Spring and Fall had been read to me at primary school, but I'd remembered only the first two lines:

Margaret are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

When at the grammar school a student teacher taught us The Windhover I was smitten, not just with Hopkins, but with poetry, for Miss Craig also introduced us to Dylan Thomas and John Donne. She was supposed to be with us for only a term, but when her training ended she joined the staff and went on to teach us much, much more.

In my thirties I found myself living in a Lancashire town where Hopkins had briefly been a priest and my interest in his work was re-kindled. I came across his correspondence with Robert Bridges (The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, Oxford University Press) and in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (Flamingo), by Robert Bernard Martin I discovered the great sadness that was Hopkins’s life – how did so much exuberance co-exist with so much melancholy?

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things --

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, & plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled, (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

I also discovered the beauty of his notebooks. The half-written poems in Hopkins's diaries remind me of Turner’s late impressionistic sketches – incomplete, but needing no completion.

My first copy of Hopkins’ work would have been a Penguin collected edition, but over the years I’ve worn out two or three of those. My shelves now contain the current Oxford edition Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics); the 1980 Oxford edition of Hopkins: Selected Prose purchased from an Oxfam shop, and the 1974 Folio edition of Poems (edited by Norman H MacKenzie), bought from a second hand bookshop in Chester.

Hopkins’s sprung rhythm should be read aloud. At school we spent many hours on The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo:

Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh
And fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly
Away with, done away with, undone
Undone, done with, soon done with,

I am deeply indebted to Miss Craig for my ability to read poetry aloud –– and for the depth that this adds to my enjoyment and understanding.

Footnote
An unexpected bonus to writing this blog is the discovery of a whole new world of poetry societies, festivals and retreats – I wish I had the time and money to subscribe to them all. I also wish I could go to this year’s Gerard Manley Hopkins Festival at Newbridge College, County Kildare, in Ireland, but my holidays are already booked and I can’t squeeze in another one – but it’s a thought for next year, as is St Bueno’s College in North Wales for a silent retreat in meditation on Hopkin’s poems. Do explore the links below – but set a timer or you’ll be surfing all day!

http://www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org/

http://www.beunos.com/

http://www.blogger.com/www.dundee.ac.uk/english/hopkins.htm

Why poetry doesn't sell - poor page design

2010-03-07T14:30:00.006Z

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve refused to buy a poetry book because of the poor quality of its design. Cheap paper, grey ink, lines too close together, a font size that’s too small to read – none of these things appeal. If we like the poems we want the book that contains them to be a permanent companion, not a one night stand.

Good page design is important. It confronts us with the poem as the poet intended it to be. Contrast Hughes’s Shackleton Hill in the original Faber paperback edition of Three Rivers, with its unfortunate positioning in the much later Faber Collected Poems where Hughes’s beautiful-eyed birds are sundered from the long branch of the world and the star-swayed tree by a page break. As I bought Collected Poems from a remainder shop I didn’t pay the hefty price shown on the cover, but even at the full price I’d rather have paid for two volumes if it meant that the poems could be better presented.

A Folio Society publication is the epitome and as each new edition comes out, I buy it. Some editions are so special (for example, the 1994 edition of The Ancient Mariner, to be covered in a future post), that they become heirlooms. Second-hand bookshops are a good source of out-of-print Folio publications. You can get them on e-bay or from AbeBooks but it’s much more fun to have a day out in Chester or Cambridge and come home with a ‘find’, such as a slightly musty smelling but otherwise perfect 1979 edition of Poems by Thomas Hardy.

The hard back editions published by the Oxford University Press are also well-designed, but the small print of the Everyman’s Library puts them out of the running. American publishers seem to do well, plenty of white space and only one poem to a page – which is surely how the poet intended us to read it. Hardbacks are the preserve of the established poet, but paperbacks can also be well-designed – I’d sooner have a Wordsworth Trust paperback edition than many hardbacks – and why shouldn't all poets benefit from good page design?

Links

http://www.ebay.co.uk

http://www.AbeBooks.co.uk

Christopher Smart (1722-1771) – Cat Jeoffrey

2010-02-22T12:27:00.011Z

In the pamphlet box on the desk by the window is Cat Jeoffrey, an extract from Jubilate Agno (Two Rivers Press, 1999). It was purchased from the shop at the British Library. Peter Hay's woodcuts perfectly illustrate Cat Jeoffrey's quirky, waggish nature. Smart (1722-1771) was confined in an asylum when he wrote the poem and the eponymous feline must have given him much needed companionship.

Cats, much more than dogs, seem to inspire writers, and Smart was certainly not the first religious to pen verses about his cat. In the 8th century Irish poem Pangur Ban a monk compares his cat’s hunting with his own scholarly pursuits:

Pangur, white Pangur, How happy we are

Alone together, scholar and cat

Each has his own work to do daily;

For you it is hunting, for me study.

Your shining eye watches the wall;

My feeble eye is fixed on a book.

You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse;

I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem.

Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other;

Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.

Version by W H Auden

Another monk, this time a 13th century Franciscan, wrote that the cat is :

. . . full lecherous in youth, swift, pliant and merry, and leapeth and rusheth on everything that is before him and is led by a straw, and playeth therewith; and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy . . . Among cats in time of love is hard fighting for wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grieviously with biting and with claws. And he maketh a ruthful noise and ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with one another ... And falleth on his own feet when he falleth out of high place....

Smart was a mid 18th century Anglican well-versed in occult lore and there are many literary and semi- mystical papers offering both Christian and occult interpretations of Smart’s visions, including Cat Jeoffrey’s activities, but as any cat lover will know, Cat Jeoffrey is a real cat and all cat owners will recognise the exactitude of the ten degrees of Jeoffrey’s getting up in the morning:

For first he looks upon his fore paws to see if they are clean.

For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.

For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore paws extended.

For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.

For fifthly he washes himself.

For sixthly he rolls upon wash.

For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.

For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.

For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.

For tenthly he goes in quest of food.

Jubilate Agno was not published until 1939, but shortly after, in 1943, Benjamin Britten set the words to music (Corydon Singers, Mathew Best, Hyperion, 1984). The poet’s relationship with his cat is a heartfelt treble solo. In W.H Auden’s translation, Pangur Ban was also set to music, this time by Samuel Barber (Songs by Samuel Barber, Gerald Finley and Julius Drake, Hyperion 2007).

Cat Jeoffrey would have taken all this creative endeavour in his stride:

For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.

www.fisheaters.com/pangurban.html

http://www.poemhunter.com/

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Smart

Edward Thomas (1878- 1917) - Adlestrop

2010-02-15T10:07:00.006Z

I knew the poem before I knew the poet. At the age of 12 I won a class reading competition by reciting Adlestrop. I don’t know how I came to know the poem – perhaps it appeared in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the only book of poetry my parents possessed – but I knew why I liked it.

As a small child I lived briefly in Batheaston and on school days my mother used to take me up to a signal box on the Great Western Railway line line; the train would stop for us, and I would be lifted in to the guard’s van for the short onward journey to Bathampton, where I went to the village school. The line passed over the river Avon and its water meadows – willows, willow herb and grass – a cosmos as small and lyrical as Thomas’s poem.

And for years after poems that I liked turned out to be poems by Edward Thomas – Tall Nettles, The Sheiling, The Ash Grove – so first I bought a cheap Everyman edition of Thomas's work, and now I have two editions, Faber and Bloodaxe, the former containing Thomas’s war diary, the latter an extensive commentary by Edna Longley.

When my teacher praised my reading of the poem I sensed also that he approved my choice of poet. Since first reading Thomas over four decades ago I have come to appreciate just what a fine poet he is, understated, intimate, each poem in its own way a small masterpiece.

Links
www.edward-thomas-fellowship.org.uk/

http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

2010-02-08T09:10:00.006Z

On shelf eight sits Solstices (Louis MacNeice, Faber&Faber, 1961), a first edition purchased from a second hand bookshop in Hebden Bridge. I was on an Arvon Foundation course at Lumb Bank, and on the Wednesday afternoon I walked down through Heptonstall, into the centre of Hebden Bridge and back up through the lovely wooded valley of Colden Clough. Earlier that year I’d been very ill, so the 5 mile circular walk was a challenge and I was glad to pause awhile in Hebden’s bookshops. The book’s reddish brown cloth binding was badly faded and its spine had come unglued, but, being a first edition, it felt like a prize for having got so far and I climbed back up through Colden Clough knowing I was well again.

The poems in Solstices disappointed, all except the last one. All Over Again is a poem to mature love so ingathered into its own world that it’s impossible to quote from it, but it is without doubt a poem that I should like to have had addressed to me.

Solstices appears in full in the centenary Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2007) but as is often the case with ‘collecteds’ the page design is poor, and All Over Again, while unaltered from 1961 is split across two pages and its twenty-four unpunctuated lines read much less well than on the one final page of the first edition. And a small mystery remains – why is the collection called Solstices, but the eponymous poem Solstice?

Credits:
The photogrpah shows the bridleway that climbs Lumb Bank out of the Colden Water valley to meet the road above Heptonstall. © Copyright michael ely

Links:
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1045250

http://www.arvonfoundation.org/

Matthew Francis (1956 - )

2010-02-01T09:06:00.009Z

I bought Matthew Francis’s Mandeville (Faber; 2008) on the basis of a favourable review from the Poetry Book Society. The review had suggested a prolific and well-informed use of medieval imagery – the mythical peoples portrayed in the Hereford Mappa Mundi; the fantastical beasts from the Bodleian Bestiary; the use of the visible to communicate the invisible. I'm a lover of all things medieval, so this book really appealed to me.

Francis gives voice to a man who may or may not have existed. In the fourteenth century an English Knight, Sir John Mandeville may have travelled though Africa, India, and the Middle East – or someone may just have sat at home and written about an imaginary Knight’s imaginary voyage around the globe.

For you must know that the world is round. In its centre
the gold pin of Jerusalem holds down the twelve winds

(Mandeville’s Departure)

Wikipedia, the source of the illustration above, suggests a Liege physician as the author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and borrowed texts as the sources for the original, but in its time the book of supposed travels acquired an extraordinary popularity and was translated into many languages.

I read Mandeville twice at one sitting. Not since Ormeros (Walcott, Faber) has a narrative sequence so enthralled me. Did it help that I was already familiar with tales of the marvels described – the barnacles in the opening poem (Mandeville’s Departure) half goose, half shell-fish; the man lying in the shade of his own singular foot (Of Island Peoples)? Possibly. More likely it was the sheer quality of the writing:

This sea has sulked so long it has forgotten wetness.
Slumped in its bed, it is too weary to raise a wave
or a few fish. There is nothing to be done with it.

(Of the Dead Sea)

These are brilliant poems, spoken in a quiet voice beside the fireplace on a winter's night .

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) - Westminster Bridge

2010-01-25T09:44:00.011Z

I had meant to be at Dove Cottage on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd January, but travel difficulties put paid to that – reader, there was no snow, it is merely that in this the fourth richest country in the world, we cannot run a rail network.

My journey to Grasmere, which should have taken only three hours, had taken nine, so it was with some relief that on the morning of Sunday 3rd I entered the devotional calm of the bookshop at the Wordsworth Museum. The books within are displayed not in rows, but singly, set out on the plain wooden shelves like chalice or patten on a Communion Table. Books of distinction, well-designed and beautifully printed on good quality paper – someone here cares about poetry. Sometimes the exterior belies the content – I am unimpressed by much of the output of the poets and artists in residence (but then I question the whole notion of residencies!) but the Trust’s publications on the Romantic Lakeland poets and artists are superb.

I buy two or three publications at every visit – I could buy on line, but the shop offers such a pleasurable experience that I’d rather wait for one of my regular trips to Grasmere. Included in my purchases on this visit was ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ (Edited by Peter Oswald and Alice Oswald, with an essay by Pamela Woolf, Shakespeare’s Globe & the Wordsworth Trust, 2002). The book is a bicentenary celebration of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ and includes a series of sonnets commissioned from contemporary poets upon the theme of bridges, often upon Westminster Bridge itself. All thirty-seven sonnets are well worth reading, but John Agard’s ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture Acknowledges Wordsworth’s Sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’’ is superb, as is Sean Borodale’s ‘From Westminster’.

I don't live in London but I often work there and pass the bridge several times a month - hard to find now the 'calm so deep' that Wordsworth praised. I'm not in general a Wordsworth fan, but I like this sonnet so much that a couple of years ago I bought the antique print (reproduced above) by Charles Taylor of the bridge as it was round about the time Wordsworth wrote his sonnet. Other equally lovely prints are reproduced in the book - all in all a very rich addition to the library!

Ronald Johnson (1935-1998)

2010-01-24T14:00:00.005Z

Where did this one come from? Ronald Johnson The Shrubberies (Flood editions, Chicago 2002). Purchased from new, priced in dollars, no bookseller’s label – maybe it was a Poetry Book Society listing? Sometimes I get so greedy for poetry I buy three or four books at a time, and not always wisely. But this is a gem.

The Shrubberies comprises the last poems Johnson wrote before his death in 1998, while he was working as an occasional gardener in an historic park. I’m an occasional gardener too, and in an old garden. Old gardens have their own motifs – birdsong, heaven,

Yes Heaven/being/garden

statuary, sunlight, rain ,

slant
rain
drops
from
each
prickle
of holly

Sparely written, sparsely punctuated, the product of months of staying in one place, Johnson’s observations are precise and beautiful. And did the editor, Peter O’ Leary, intend the index to be a found poem, a horticultural abecedary?

“after the lilac”
“an armature of the future”
“an expanse of lawn”
“and held a candle to”

Elizabeth Barrat Browning (1806 - 1861)

2010-01-17T10:23:00.010Z

My collection of poetry books began many years ago with the purchase of The Love Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (Edited V.E. Slack; Century Hutchison, The Century Lives and Letters, 1987) from a charity shop .

In these letters Elizabeth, at 38 a much-admired poet, is fluent, shrewd, and effortlessly entertaining. When amid plans for her elopement with Robert her pet spaniel Flush is kidnapped and held to ransom by dog-stealers she writes:

“Flush doesn’t know that we can recover him, and he is in the extremest despair all this while, poor darling Flush, with his fretful fears and pretty whims, and his fancy of being near me. All the night he will howl and lament, I know perfectly, - for I fear we shall not ransom him tonight.” [September 2nd, 1846]

Robert, six years her junior and a prolific but not yet fully-recognised writer, had once been bitten by Flush. He responds immediately:

“ . . . and did all that barking and fanciful valour spend itself on such enemies as Mr Kenyon and myself, leaving only blandness and waggings of the tail for the man with the bag?” [September 2nd 1846]

The book provokes, amuses and inspires; Elizabeth’s Sonnets from the Portuguese are included as an appendix to their love letters.

Sonnets from the Portuguese
XL111
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Not shown to Robert until three years after their marriage and not published until 1850, Elizabeth must have written the sonnets during the 20 months of her correspondence with Browning. I bought this book during a period of convalescence after a long illness culminating in major surgery. I was roughly the same age as Elizabeth was when she wrote these letters and sonnets and just as meeting Robert marked a turning point in her life, so buying this book marked a turning point in mine, not least a return to poetry after twenty years of abstinence. The book is old now, and its pages yellowed, but I wouldn’t part with it, because for me it’s freighted with memories, good and bad, but very rich.

Links

http://www.browningsociety.org/

W.S. Merwin (1927- ) and John Felstiner

2010-01-16T16:09:00.008Z

Many of my books come from the Poetry Book Society (the PBS) which I joined many years ago. Its reviews are short, non-academic and contain enough of the poetry to give me a feel for whether or not I'm going to enjoy the poems. It's such a pleasure to fnd the PBS Quarterly Review and free book in my mail box that I postpone opening the jiffy bag until I have time for a cup of tea and an hour's reading.

The Shadow of Sirius (Bloodaxe Books 2009) is a recent recommendation from the PBS. It won Merwin his second Pulitzer Prize. The spareness of the writing reminds me of Ryokan, its freshness, of Edward Thomas. The poems in this volume have the simplicity of complete attentiveness, be that to alterations in the light, to a broken glass or to a curlew flying into extinction. It would be hard to choose a favourite, but The Curlew is exquisite – in six short lines Merwin attests to our culpability for the destruction of a species.

On the strength of a 2009 review in the Times Literary Supplement http://www.the-tls.co.uk I had borrowed Can Poetry Save the Earth? A field guide to nature poems (John Felstiner, Yale University Press, 2009 http://www.yalebooks.co.uk/) from my local library, but liked it so much I bought my own copy. More about Felstiner's book in a future post, but in it he tells how in 1995 Merwin had fostered a new edition of Fred Bosworth’s The Last of the Curlews (1955 Washington). Bosworth had recreated the nine-thousand mile migration of an Eskimo curlew, but the bird is now critically endangered, possibly extinct http://www.birdlife.org. The Curlew may be its epitaph.

Felstiner’s book is worth buying for the bibliography alone. Felstiner begins with the psalms and ends with Snyder and his final two sentences sum up all the wealth in between:

“Can poetry save the earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.”

Merwin's poems turn our hearts towards the earth, and for sure, she is worth saving.

John Keats’s ( 1795-1821) Lamia

2010-01-05T21:53:00.017Z

J.W. Waterhouse
Lamia (by the pond) 1909
One of the pleasures of having shelves full of poetry is the ability to read the text of a poem while listening to it on the radio.

In her preview of BBC Radio 4’s Afternoon Play for New Year’s Day, an adaptation of John Keats’s sensual narrative poem Lamia, Jane Anderson mentions the risk of a moment’s inattention on the part of the listener leaving the rest of the production unfathomable (Radio Times 19 December 2009-January 1st 2010). The risk is diminished – and the pleasure of the poetry greatly enhanced – by reading the text as you listen to the narrative.

So, I found a comfortable chair, switched on the radio and opened up my edition of Keats (John Keats: The Complete Poems, The Folio Society 2001 ). It’s a beautiful book - the Folio website states that it won the Printing World Kolbus Award for the finest achievement in British book production, 2001 - which means it’s easy on the eye, essential when the reader is listening as well as reading.

When poetry is read aloud sound becomes as important as rhythm, assonance as rich as rhyme, the rhyme itself softened by the enjambed meaning;

There she stood
About a young bird’s flutter from a wood,
Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread,
By a clear pool, wherein she passioned
To see herself escaped from so sore ills,
While her robes flaunted with the daffodils.

Narrated by Patterson Joseph, Lamia is available on BBC iplayer until the 8th January 2010.

Links

http://www.john-keats.com/

Poetry doesn't sell

2010-01-05T15:06:00.007Z

Poets and their publishers frequently say that there is only a limited readership for poetry - in other words, poetry doesn't sell. There are exceptions - Hughes, Heaney, Duffy - but by and large readers are unlikely to buy poetry because it's been featured on 'Richard and Judy' or reviewed in their favourite monthly glossy. More about the reasons why poetry doesn't sell in later posts, but to many prospective readers (those who enjoy Hughes's 'Thought Fox' or Kipling's 'If') poetry is seen as the province of academics (type 'Christopher Smart' into your search engine and you'll see what I mean) or students on creative writing courses. Poetry thrives, but less for pleasure than as an intellectual pursuit.

Poetry is an intimate art that doesn't lend itself to mass marketing, and where it does the marketing tends to focus on the poet, not the poems - poets who are mad, bad or dangerous to know. The conundrum facing publishers, who must sell to survive, is that poems speak to individual persons. Poetry stirs the spirit, not the purse. And yet some of us do collect poetry, do create our own private book closet. What prompts us to buy our first book of poems? What keeps us coming back for more? Why buy poetry?

Poets buy poetry, that we do know, for the association between poets and their book closets is of long standing - reams have been written about what was in, or might have been in, Shakespeare's collection of books, and it is generally assumed that his home in Stratford-on-Avon housed a small room where he read and wrote. Wordsworth had a 'Golden Chest' of books, and early in the 20th Century Ford Madox Ford (1) exhorted young poets to "come out of their book closets" that they might write convincingly of modern life.

But how does a reader who is not a poet get from the first book, which probably contains a favourite poem, through a handful of books, to the recognition that the component elements now constitute a library? These are questions with implications for how poetry works, for when a library has been assembled over a period of many years by a reader for her own personal pleasure, one consequence is that the poetry it houses becomes more private and more personal than the poet had perhaps intended. Each book on my shelves has a story behind it, and in the hope that you too will come to poetry for pleasure I'd like to share these stories with you.

I now own more than 500 volumes of poetry. Did I begin with Tennyson bought while I was still at school, and only recently replaced with the Folio edition? With the John Ciardi translation of The Divine Comedy (Norton, 1970) purchased with the surprise gift of a book-token? With Donne, or with the Thomases? With Ryokan, given by a former lover? With Longley, or with Heaney? And was it Snyder or Gluck who led me to explore the distinctive and vigorous energies of contemporary American poetry?

My sources are eclectic. Friendships and second hand bookshops are as likely a source as reviews in the Times Literary Supplement or recommendations from the Poetry Book Society. A holiday in Nepal led to Milton; a trip to Wimpole Hall to Conrad Aiken. But behind each book is a story of leisure hours and of how these are spent in the serious and joyous business of poetry.

(1) Ford Madox Ford, 'Modern Poetry' essay in The Critical Attitude, London, Duckworth, 1911, p 120 cited in The Verse Revolutionaries, Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists, Helen Carr, Jonathan Cape, 2009