Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 18

Review of "The Darkening Age" by Catherine Nixey, pub. Macmillan 2017

Review of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey, pub. Macmillan 2017

"The destroyers came from out of the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them for years, a marauding band of black-robed zealots armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness. […] The zealots roared with laughter as they smashed the "evil", "idolatrous" statues; the faithful jeered as they tore down temples, stripped roofs and defaced tombs. 'These shameful things', sang pilgrims proudly, 'our good Saviour trampled down all together.'"

Aye, those early Christians could be a right band of thugs, and vandalism was not the only disquieting resemblance they bore to Taliban or ISIL fanatics. They also craved martyrdom, to the extent that the church eventually had to discourage them from actively seeking it. One sympathises with the Roman governor of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, who got so exasperated by the queue of Christians at his door eagerly confessing their faith (which he would as soon not have known about) and demanding to be martyred, that he exclaimed "Oh you ghastly people, if you want to die so much, can't you throw yourselves off a cliff?"

Unfortunately they were also a danger to the lives of others. The story of Hypatia of Alexandria, torn to pieces by a mob for being a learned mathematician, is well known, but anyone who has read Philip Pullman's recent novel La Belle Sauvage and suspected him of drawing the long bow in his description of the League of Alexander should note John Chrysostom's recorded exhortations to the faithful to spy on and betray their friends and neighbours, not only for practising non-Christian worship but for sins like going to the theatre: "Let us be meddlesome and search out those who have fallen. Even if we must enter into the fallen one's home, let us not think twice about it."

Chrysostom, sounding even more like a Taliban sobersides than usual, rejoiced that "the tyranny of joy and the accursed festivals has been obliterated like smoke". Obliterating joy was something in which he and his kind took a suspicious pleasure: the exaltation of pointless pain and suffering (on the assumption that the more pain in this world, the less in the next) dates from this time. So does a poisonous distrust and resentment of learned people, even of learning itself ("Intellectual simplicity, or to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance, was widely celebrated"). This was partly what caused Hypatia's murder; the Christians of Alexandria, and the mobs they encouraged, had decided they had no time for experts.

This is a scholarly but readable history, in which people like the pagan philosophers Libanius and Damascius, adrift in times which have rejected and devalued all they have learned and believed in, come alive affectingly. One cannot but be moved by Damascius, finally leaving Athens when he is forbidden to teach, setting out in his seventies for somewhere he can go on being the person he has been all his life. And two quotations near the start sum up the theme rather neatly. On the one hand St Augustine: "That all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims." On the other, the pagan Symmachus: "We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?"

Review of "The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began" by Stephen Greenblatt, pub. Vintage 2012

A book about a book: what it says, how it came to be written, lost and rediscovered, what far-reaching effects it had on human thought, and about the man who hunted it down.

The book is Lucretius's De Rerum Naturae, pretty much the sole remaining repository of the beliefs of the great atomists Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus; the book-hunter is Poggio Bracciolini, who spent the early years of the fifteenth century traipsing around Europe trying to hunt down ancient classical manuscripts. (He even got as far as England, but was disappointed, advising his friends "you had better give up hope of books from England, for they care very little for them here".)

Poggio was book-hunting because, like so many humanist scholars of his day, he worshipped the writers of classical Greece and Rome and thought his own time could not equal them. Whether he realised how radical the world-view of Lucretius actually was in its contentions - that matter consisted of atoms constantly in flux, that if there were gods, they could not possibly care two hoots about the doings of humans and that pain was a thing to be avoided, all diametrically opposed to Christian views of the day - is an interesting question. It is possible that he simply admired the style and elegance of Lucretius's Latin without paying too much attention to the message, and that is certainly the defence humanist scholars tended to put up when accused of preferring "heathen" works to those of the church fathers. On the other hand, Poggio did not much like the monks among whom, of necessity, he sought his ancient treasures; the monastic libraries were where old manuscripts were to be found, but he thought monks fairly useless people and declined to take holy orders himself, despite the career advancement this would have brought him. He also expressed, in a letter to a friend, such unstinting admiration for the "heretic" Jerome of Prague, whose trial and execution he witnessed, that the alarmed friend advised him to be more careful with his language in future.

The organisation of this book is pleasing: it begins with the book-hunt and progresses through an account of the book itself to its effect on its own and later times. It is a proper history, with notes and bibliography, but is written in a readable style and is never less than fascinating. It makes Lucretius's own book sound even more so, and will surely cause me to rectify my ignorance of the man. Since I enjoyed it so much it seems a shame to have to end with my usual complaint against so many modern non-fiction works, namely their inclusion of a preface in which the author witters on about his reasons for writing the book and its personal significance in his life. Please, editors and publishers, spare us the bloody "journey". I don't care why the author wrote the book; since he is a Harvard professor I would assume he did so out of a love of scholarship and that's fine. I certainly don't need to know about his mother's neuroses, as if he were Leonard in The Big Bang Theory. As usual, I must advise Gentle Reader to ignore the preface completely and dive straight into the text.

Review of "Heida: A Shepherd at the Edge of the World"

Review of "Heida: A Shepherd at the Edge of the World" by Steinunn Sigurdardottir and Heida Asgeirsdottir, trs Philip Roughton, pub. John Murray 2019

This is a memoir of a real woman, Heida Asgeirsdottir, an Icelandic sheep farmer, written down by a novelist and poet, Steinunn Sigurdardottir. The latter admits to being influenced in her narrative methods by the books of Svetlana Alexievch, which are based on interviews with many different people. They're good too, I like them myself, but am not sure the technique works so well for reporting one person. The chapters are mainly short, some only one paragraph, and read like bits of random conversation transcribed, then cut and pasted into what sometimes feels like a fairly arbitrary order. The organisation into four seasons does help, but within that pattern, different autumns, winters etc are jumbled together; the book veers wildly between childhood and adulthood and from subject to subject. Also, the story of Heida's fight against the proposal for a huge power plant that would wreck her farm is interspersed with the life of the farm. To me, this narration is too bitty and stop-start.

Heida is interesting on the daily routine of the farm, and often very enlightening:

"If I manage to shear all the sheep on the same day I bring them in, that's a dream because they're like marshmallows, all dry and puffy. The ewes mustn't be inside for more than one night before being sheared, otherwise their wool gets spoiled and has to be marked as second-rate. It's crucial to keep the wool from becoming moist or wet, so that it doesn't start to get mouldy."

Who knew? There's a lot of this and it is fascinating. it would be more so if this book had the map it really needs – I do know roughly where's where in Iceland but needed far more detail about this district, the distances between places and the potential effect of the power plant. A map would have given all of this.

Another problem is the poems, some Heida's, some quotes from famous Icelandic poets. Since all alike come across as total rhyme-led doggerel, I suspect there is a translation problem, related to a determination to preserve the rhymes, which I have come across before in Icelandic novels that contain poems. I think a lot of epigrammatic sharpness goes missing because most prose translators do not really have the specialised expertise to translate poems.

To sum up: much interest but a terribly bitty structure.

Review of Charles I's Killers In America, by Matthew Jenkinson, pub. OUP 2019

This announces itself as being about the "lives and afterlives" of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two signatories to Charles I's death warrant who, on the eve of the Restoration, escaped to America. Lives, in the sense of what became of them in their new land; afterlives in the sense of their posthumous reputation there and its effect on later events.

This is the sort of odd corner of history that always attracts me, but I felt the "afterlives" bit was considerably the more interesting, and where the book really came alive. You would think that two men trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the officials sent out to arrest them would make a gripping narrative. If it doesn't, I think that is because Whalley and Goffe never really come alive as people. From the chapters dealing with the war and the Commonwealth, we learn that they were both good soldiers and very religious, which one might have guessed, and later we learn that Goffe was prone to depression and always felt a stranger in America. But that's about it. These men had wives and families in England, and were in correspondence with them, but we learn nothing of their personal relationships, and much as I sympathised with their cause, it was hard to get really interested in the fate of two men practically without personalities. In fact, the interest lies more in how their survival becomes tangled up with the political differences between Charles II and his already-murmuring American colony.

This may not be altogether the author's fault, because to judge by the fragment of Goffe's diary that remains to us, and is included as an appendix, he at least was an obsessively god-bothering bore of the first order. It is after he and Whalley die that they become part of America's mythology, and a good deal more interesting in legend and fiction than they ever were in life. The story of the "Angel of Hadley", which just might, fascinatingly, be true, has Goffe surfacing from hiding to lead the inhabitants of a town in fighting off an attack by indigenous tribes (who, you may not be surprised to hear, were entirely in the right of the quarrel). Hawthorne may have had this tale in mind in his short story "The Gray Champion", where an ancient Puritan returns from the dead at critical moments in his country's history, and the Angel story, true or not, is clearly related to legends in which other countries' champions - Arthur, Joan, Theseus, Holger Danske - appear to soldiers in battle centuries later. Other stories cluster around these two in folk memory - everyone seems to have wanted to claim a family connection to them, especially at times of conflict with England.

Their myth was helped to prosper by an astonishingly silly act on the part of the English government, which I hadn't previously known about. In 1662, just after the restoration, a statute was passed decreeing that the anniversary of Charles I's death, January 30th, should be observed in all churches of England, Ireland, Wales and the dominions as "an anniversary of fasting and humiliation" on which sermons should be preached lamenting disobedience to monarchs. Given that many, certainly in New England, regarded the day in question as anything but lamentable, this was a provocative folly which served only to keep grudges and resentment alive. "30th of January sermons", both in England and America, quite frequently became subversive, drawing attention to the faults of kings rather than their supposed divinity.

The way the two men become part of a country's myth and fiction is intrinsically interesting, and well documented here, as is the way their star rises and falls in popular estimation according to what is happening in politics at the time - heroes during the War of Independence, less so after the murders of Lincoln and Kennedy, both of which, at the time, were described as "regicides". I think the writing style could be livelier, and less inclined to repeat points already made. The contemporary pictures and engravings reproduced in the book are welcome, if a bit blurry.

Review of She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India, by Katie Hickman

Pub. Virago 2019

"How much there is to delight the eye in this bright and beautiful world! Oh, the pleasure of vagabondizing through India." – Fanny Parkes

This book began as so many do: the author was researching a quite different book (about eighteenth and nineteenth-century courtesans), found someone who didn't quite fit the theme but was interesting anyway, and went off at a fascinating tangent. The life of diplomatic and Army wives in British India, not to mention the annual "fishing fleet" of young ladies hoping to become wives, has been documented in several books that draw on their own diaries and letters but this book goes further back than most, to the wild early days of the East India Company when sobriety was unheard-of and India was regarded as a repository for dissolute sons. Women hardly figured at all at first, and those few who did needed to be tough and resourceful characters.

It has to be said that she-merchants, though they are mentioned, do not figure nearly as much as gentlewomen (I still don't know where the buccaneers came in). The source material is heavily based on private diaries and letters, in which of course one can hear the women's voices, and I am guessing that the merchants were far too busy trading to spend much time writing letters home or keeping diaries, whereas gentlewomen, with time on their hands, did a great deal of both. But there are other sources, and ways of building up character, and it is a pity, I think, that we do not see more of entrepreneurs like Mary Cross, import-export trader with Persia, professional portrait-painters Sarah Baxter and Catherine Read, not to mention Poll Puff, who sold apple pastries in Calcutta.

What we do get is a very disparate group of women, from various social classes, and while some never settle in their strange new surroundings, most of those we meet become fascinated by India and curious to find out more about it. Henrietta Clive busily collects insects and minerals during her extensive travels; Julia Maitland is warned by other English wives in Bangalore to stay away from the "native" bazaar in the old fort; her response is "so I went the next day, of course". Biddy Timms goes further; she becomes Mrs Meer Hassan Ali and spends a decade living in her husband's zenana in Lucknow. Many of the English emigree women were intensely curious about their secluded Indian counterparts and some managed to make good friends across the cultural divide. They also managed to travel a great deal and, sometimes, to break through class barriers that were still impenetrable at home.

I do find the pre-Victorian parts of the book the most interesting. This is partly because the Victorian period has been more documented but also because life in British India was by then becoming more regulated and stuffy than in the early days of the Company. I think the author may also have avoided certain potentially interesting memorialists from this period, like Iris Portal, because they figured in Annabel Venning's "Following the Drum" (2005), about army wives. For this period Hickman leans heavily on non-army sources, like Fanny Parkes, wife of a Company official, who is admittedly a mesmerising force of nature, and the Eden women, Emily and Fanny, wife and sister of the Governor-General, whose languid cattiness can get a bit tiresome. And the 1857-and-after period feels rushed.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book very much. It is impossible not to become invested in what happens to women like Charlotte Hickey, London prostitute reinventing herself in Calcutta as a respectable wife, Fanny Parkes, at ease in Indian society, hopelessly out of her depth in her own (but never aware of how earnestly her hosts wish she would be going), Eliza Fay, intrepid traveller, careless alike of grammar and social barriers – E M Forster's nastily patronising dismissal of her in his introduction to her letters ("her mental equipment was that of an intelligent lady's maid") has made me think the less of him for ever. These voices come over as clear as they did when they wrote: as Eliza says, "this story must be told in my own way, or not at all".

This is my new book, by the way....

From Seren Books

Review of The Bramble King by Catherine Fisher, pub Seren 2019

Sell me, the house says, sell me.
I'm tired of you,
the way you neglect me,
don't quite see me any more.
The way you gaze through me every night
as if you wanted something else. (The House to its Owner)

This lippy house is one of several opinionated edifices and locations in Catherine Fisher's long-awaited new collection. An ominous row of conifers near Avebury deters a walker; a woman living in a building converted from a cinema finds her flat full of images from its past:

In bed she sleeps among the other couples,
a rapid flicker of embraces

while, in what for me was a stand-out poem, "The Building and the Boy", a classic fairytale castle in a forest entraps and defeats a potential explorer as it has done many before. This building has mixed feelings; it develops a fondness for its hapless challengers:

He leaves a trail of breadcrumbs,
unravels wool his mother made him bring,
marks corners with his name, doors with initials […]

The building smiles. The building feels quite tickled.
Rather likes the artless images.
Closes the gate carefully. Withdraws the bridge.

Fisher has always played variations on myth, but while some of those here are recognisably traceable to different sources, like the Odyssey and the Mabinogi, others, like the sentient Building, the "Clockwork Crow" and the "Daughter of the Sun", feel more archetypal, indeed as if their ultimate source might be the inside of the poet's head. And even the Sleeping Beauty sequence subverts its source; this sounds more like a princess in a coma, who may always have been more conscious than she looked. The back cover's description od "darkly resonant" is more apt than these sometimes are; there is a thread of darkness running through most of these poems. The cover picture is a detail from Botticelli's "Primavera", and it relates to the poem "Post-War", about the moment when Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and others happened on a cache of priceless paintings stored in Montegufoni castle for fear of bombing. The painting is an allegory on the coming of spring, and the poem too ends on an optimistic note, of rebirth "despite the dead. Despite everything". Yet when one looks carefully at the detail selected, things are more complicated. The image shows Flora's hands and arms against her dress covered in red-pink flowers. Her lacy sleeves are red-tinted too, and look for all the world as if the arms beneath are bleeding. Which could be so, because in Ovid's version, which this poem references, Flora was originally a wood-nymph, Chloris, ("green"), who is ravished by the West Wind and, in the act, turns into the goddess of spring, "flowers spilling from her mouth". The story may be a fanciful gloss on how green shoots turn to blossom, but it is a dark tale, the red flowers too reminiscent of blood for any sentimental comfort. Spring survives the war, as did the painting, "despite the dead", but that does not alter the facts of death and suffering.

It is the dark thread, the blood among the flowers, that gives these poems their vigour and vim. Those already familiar with Fisher's acclaimed YA fantasy novels will find the same blend of lyricism and violence here. There's even a clockwork crow.

Review of A Stranger City by Linda Grant, pub Virago 2019

Departure, take-off, ascent. From the air the Thames is a wiggling serpent. It has not always had this shape, it will not in the future. The seas will rise, the barrier will not hold them. Like everything, London is a temporary place, a temporary condition.

Some of the reviews I have read of this novel seem to me to miss the point badly. Readers who complain of confusion were looking for a single protagonist whose storyline they could follow, but the protagonist is London in 2016/17, and that can only be brought alive through a multitude of characters whose lives constantly intersect, merge and diverge.

The body of a woman, fished out of the Thames, cannot be identified, though indications are that she was a suicide. Two men, Pete, the policeman who worked on her case, and Alan, who makes a TV documentary about it, become invested in finding out more about her  (in Pete's case obsessively) and the story mainly follows them, their ramifying families and friends and the neighbours Alan and his wife Francesca encounter in the district of London to which they have just moved. The word "stranger" in the title might lead one to expect a focus on isolation, on lack of connectedness in the big city, but this is not so. The characters actually interconnect in a lot of ways, some of which they are unaware of, and the London built up in the novel is one of neighbourhoods, separate, sometimes seeming alien to each other, but still crossing and interacting.

Most of the characters, though, either first arrived in London as strangers or have parents or grandparents who did so. The ethnic diversity of London is constantly stressed, and one theme which emerges very strongly is the way in which, after the 2016 referendum and the 2017 London Bridge attack, people who had long felt at home there began to sense hostility from their neighbours. It is in this sense that the city, rather than those in it, begins to become a "stranger".

This creeping unease is well conveyed, though it is possible to wonder if it might be overdone. That one of our characters might suffer a race-related attack is credible; when the tally gets to three, I do wonder if it still is. Though, not being a Londoner, I have no way of knowing for sure. I don't know, either, if the description of the deportation trains is accurate:

    With the thaw, Alan spent even more time sitting alone at the end of the garden, his ear cocked for the thrumming on the rails of the occasional deportation trains diverted along their branch line, the filthy engines spattered with mud coming down from the north-east. The carriage windows were blacked out, desperate fingers scratched away at the paint. […] Rows of human monitors along the track held up placards of protest and solidarity. Most days he joined them on the bridge.
          Inside the trains the deportees raised their palms, pleading at the glass. The deportation infrastructure formed a network of cross-hatching across the eternal landscape of England, its woods and remaining patches of forest, its indigenous trees and its invaders, oaks, rills, brooks, ditches, barrows, mountains, faint vestiges of enclosed commons. Across all this, solid lines of track were moving towards temporary detention centres and on to airports and sea ferries.

Some readers' reviews have dismissed this as exaggeration, an attempt to invoke the Holocaust.  To me it sounds likely, though as I say I can't know for sure. In a way, this is the point: that this issue fractures society to the point where some will find it eyebrow-raising but credible, while others will dismiss it out of hand. Pete and his wife Marie have this argument at one point:

     If you lived in a coastal port, you had to expect people would come in as well as go out. Some of them would be bad 'uns. He'd tried to explain that to Marie. You couldn't have London without foreigners, it wouldn't be the same place, would it? It'd be some lily-white National Trust mock-up with volunteers dressed in mob caps and packets of shortbread in the gift shop.

Actually of course it could be something a whole lot worse. Francesca at one point stumbles on an enclave known as "the Island", though it isn't one, which has managed to insulate itself from most of the change around it. It is an inward-looking community, hostile to outsiders, mostly ageing; the only two children in evidence show signs of mental incapacity. Anyone with any get up and go has long since got up and gone. The message is clear: communities that resist change and outside influence do not just stay the same, they stagnate and turn sour.

The denouement of the body-in-the-Thames thread doesn't feel quite right to me; I could have wished for more mystery to remain. And I did, sometimes, lose track of the myriad characters and think "who the hell was Johanna?". Hint to litfic writers: genre authors sometimes give readers, at the start, a list of characters with identifiers ("Johanna, Alan's work colleague"). It isn't the worst idea.

These are minor points about a novel as pulsing, colourful and alive as the city that is its protagonist. I enjoyed it greatly, and I'm not even a fan of London.

Review of Scotia Extremis, eds Andy Jackson and Brian Johnstone, pub. Luath Press

This is an anthology of poems inspired by aspects of Scotland and predicated on the idea that Scotland is a place with a split personality, veering between extremes. The editors put up online a list of topics, which were then chosen by individual poets. In fact the topics came in pairs, though the poets worked alone, to suggest these extremes.

I'm not sure the idea itself convinces me, because the older I get, the less I believe in so-called national characteristics and the more I incline to the view of Confucius – "people's natures are alike; it is their habits that drive them far apart". Yes, Scots, or some of them, have "attitude", as several poems suggest; so do Danes and Russians and no doubt so did ancient Babylonians. But because the poets chose their topics, rather than being set them, there is a lot of interest in how each interpreted the aspect they chose.

In fact, over and over, the chosen aspect evokes not so much a place as a place in time and a family member associated with that time: mothers, fathers, grandparents and indeed childhoods haunt these poems. The garment in Mandy Haggith's "Tweed", long gone to some jumble sale, is craved for its connection with a now-dead mother:

     So now, although I hunger to shrug it over my shoulders,
     put my hands into her pockets

This is moving, because most of us have been there and can identify with the situation, but its power, indeed its universality, comes from the lost garment's connection with the lost person: the fact that its fabric was tweed is incidental – habit rather than nature, as Confucius would have it. John Glenday's "The Numbers Stations", allegedly about the Arbroath smokie, in fact uses it as an image in a sombre poem about a childhood of the 50s and 60s, haunted by fears of what used to be called the shadow of the bomb:

    smoke-grey rucks of skin sloughing from his flesh

    and the cured flesh peeling easily from the bone.

Here again, though local references abound, the experience was universal; Anne Berkeley's collection The Men from Praga (Salt 2009) records just such a bomb-haunted 60s childhood at the other end of Britain.

Some poems, of course, do focus more on their particular, nominal subjects. Dawn Wood and Marjorie Lotfi Gill, paired to write about artists Joan Eardley and Eduardo Paolozzi, both enter sensitively into their subjects' ways of working, while Angus Peter Campbell in "William Topaz McGonagall", does a fine job of imitating his subject's cadences without, I'm glad to say, mocking him, for he was a man who deserved better than mockery.

I was glad also to see a concrete poem a la Edwin Morgan – Rebecca Sharp's "The Declaration of Barrbru"- for one problem with this project was that Mr Morgan had already dealt so well with some of these topics that I was hearing his voice instead of those on the page. He needed to echo in this book somewhere. The most interesting poems, perhaps, were those that somehow managed to find an unexpected angle on their subject, and where how something was said became at least as important as what was said. Tracey Herd's gripping little psychodrama "Bible Joanne", Tessa Berring's freewheeling "Caryatid" and Gerry Loose's incantatory "Gruinard Island" are among them.

With this format – different aspects of a nation – there will be both something to please most people, also something that goes over their heads, for generational or other reasons (from the poems where they appear, I gather Orange Juice and Arab Strap must be bands, but frankly they might be Chinese emperors for all I knew). It's a very diverse, lively anthology and very nicely produced. A deil o a broth, as Dilys Rose remarks in "Cullen Skink".

Review of Poems from Cardiff pub. Seren 2019

This is a pamphlet in a Seren series celebrating poems of place (the others are Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia and the Borders). There are 27 poems –one is mine, but I am following my rule that one poem doesn't disqualify me from reviewing a book.

It's tricky to review poems about a place one knows really well. I am conscious that "Clare Road" and "Animal Wall" evoke an immediate response in me that wouldn't happen in someone unfamiliar with the city.  But I can say that Cardiff's essential gallusness comes through in many of them, for instance Oliver Reynolds' "Taff":

     is a thief river
     stealing from little hills
     sneaking to Cardiff
     to paint the town black

     has a dirty mouth
     and colludes with the sea,
     French-kissing the channel
     all the way round to Brest

For all the Taff is a lot cleaner these days, that still resonates. Most of these poems, in fact, come from recent times, which means that some once-iconic sights and smells of Cardiff – the vivid steel-town sunsets, the aroma of malt that used to pervade the city from Brains' brewery – are missing. But a sea town it always was and still is, and some of the most evocative poems are those with a sea connection, like Philip Gross's "Sluice Angel" about the great lock gates at the barrage, and Mike Jenkins' "Kairdiff Central Seagull", a bird with attitude:

     It struts around me:
     I am surrounded by a single bird!

This also highlights the sardonic, irreverent humour that is so much part of the city, as does Peter Finch's "St David's Hall", poking fun at the great and good coming out of a concert feeling "enormous cymrectitude". I had just recovered from that coinage when he capped it with his description of their attire, "those woollen celtic/drapes that make you look like an overweight bat". Finch on form is the Ken Dodd of poetry; the jokes come faster than you can react to them. His other poem here works less well for me, but that's the point of him; he takes risks, and sometimes they come off.

Of course certain things are common to all cities, in one form or another, and I should think Aheer Ameer's "Roathed" would strike a chord with most city-dwellers, because every city surely must have a slightly precious, hippy-dippy but pleasantly relaxed suburb like Roath, where one can "swan off with the swans".

There are a few poems I like less, and a few that I don't feel have much to do with Cardiff. And things I miss. The city's multiculturalism doesn't come over as much as I would like. But the attitude, the humour, the liminal nature of this city that is edgy in all senses is there, also the arcades with their niche shops, their oddly haunting quality perfectly captured by the king of nostalgia, Paul Henry:

      Already you're gone, fixing your eyes
      on a road's darkening arcade.

     What song do you sing as the light fades?

     The music shop you work in has closed
     but I have to believe it is not too late.

     Is it your eyes or your laugh I miss most?

     I'd buy you those boots or that bracelet
     your mother wore, or an amber ring

     to prove it is not too late to sing,
     to prove we are more than worn-out ghosts.

     Dream in arcades, love. Dream in arcades.