Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 19

Review of Vanitas by Ann Drysdale, pub. Shoestring Press 2019

Review of Vanitas by Ann Drysdale, pub. Shoestring Press 2019


I watch you go, as all have gone before,
lurching from accident to consequence.

This is a collection that is upfront about where its poetry comes from. A long life of wide reading is one source. The title of the first poem, UPON FIRST LOOKING INTO A GIDEON BIBLE, invites an overt comparison with Keats's breathless mind-travelling through Homer. But the travellers the hotel bible addresses, who "measure out your lives in rented rooms", are on no such epic journey. What the book might have to say to them is irrelevant, since they are unlikely to take it out of the drawer; it becomes, instead, a rather ironic symbol of permanence in their transient world:

     that you are simply a coincidence.
     I am a constant, a sad paradigm
     for shrinking distance and compressing time.

This is an unusually overt literary reference, most of them are more embedded, the natural consequence of wide reading. This gives the poems a deep hinterland, as when in "Just Desserts", a poem in which cooking and eating are used to exorcise the ghosts of past relationships, the casual phrase "The crimson currant merges with the white" distantly echoes a Tennysonian love poem.

Many are rooted too in real land, the rural setting in which the poet practised shepherding. In "The Lyke-Wake Talk", an imagined funeral, a life is distilled to, and recalled by, various places that were focal points in it, in a way reminiscent of how the custom of beating the bounds was meant to fix a local landscape in people's minds.

One of the most notable features of this collection is its wide verbal register, all the way from the formality of the opening poem through to dogspeak (think Les Murray and cows) in the first poem of the sequence "Dog Days". I especially admired the forensic accuracy, not to mention sheer interest and unexpectedness, in "A Sea View". Beginning in a deliberately alarming, disorienting way:

     There are crisp legs spread all over the balcony
     pink and white, artless and opened up to the sky

we soon meet the culprit:

     The white bird tumbles clumsily out of the sun
     carrying a small crab like a novelty reticule
     held ostentatiously in its tight tweezer-beak,
     every leg pedalling, each one on its unicycle

That "novelty reticule" is pitch-perfect, as indeed is the whole poem. So, most of the time, is her more colloquial register – Jack the house-martin with his "new build" under the eaves. The only time it ever jars is on the few occasions when it slides into the non-adult. I don't know if this is just my personal quirk but for me, words like "whiffy" and "stinky" are too much the province of schoolchildren to look at ease in adult poems.

If animals and birds figure prominently, so do childhood memories, and they are all well evoked, but though this is natural subject matter for any writer, there is a problem in that we have all read so many "I remember" poems. It's a theme, therefore, that needs something special in order to work, and the best example of that in this collection is "Too Much Sky", a war memory that only announces itself as such via the date in the epigraph. Here the memory is enough out of the common to startle, yet because we are seeing through a child's eyes we can identify with it. She finds a similarly original way into the much-used theme of bereavement, not many have adopted her technique of allowing the loved ghost to age in her mind:

     There on my left, as ever, lies your ghost,
     hunched in the still-familiar position.
     I’ve let it age with me so I won’t lose it.
     Pursing my lips I blow the fine white hair
     that strives to hide the vulnerable scalp
     making a place to plant a phantom kiss

Her concerns range from the very serious, like bereavement here, and incipient dementia in "Connie Calls", to the completely whimsical, like the dung-beetle likened to a football player dribbling a rather unusual ball. The whimsy will not work for everyone, for nothing is so personal a taste as humour. But it is the ever-present consciousness and possibility of humour that often humanises the darker poems and staves off any hint of sentimentality. The sign-off in "Way To Go", where the speaker's ghost hops down from a horse-drawn hearse to help the street urchin coming behind with his bucket, is wryly typical.

Vanitas is available from Shoestring here

The Place Where You Aren't

Writers and displacement

Now and then, someone organises a scholarly conference on the importance to writers of a sense of place (generally in some place unreachable by public transport). But the other reason I never end up going is that, with a few exceptions, or apparent exceptions, the writers who fascinate me do not have a sense of place so much as a sense of displacement.

Though I think this may always have been so, I became conscious of it while teaching on the University of Glamorgan's Masters in Writing degree when I was successively tutor to three poets, all émigrées to the UK from the USA – Tamar Yoseloff, Karen Annesen and Barbara Marsh. What struck me about all of them was that they observed the place where they now lived differently; they noticed and highlighted things that for a native-born poet might not have stood out, and over and over, their sense of the place where they were was informed by their equally keen sense of that other place where they had once been, but now were not.

A perfectly adjusted organism would be silent

- E M Forster: A Passage to India

Most teachers of writing have had students ask the question "why is poetry so unhappy?" particularly with reference to love poetry, and have replied with some variant on Forster's remark. The very act of writing suggests something out of kilter in the writer's relationship to his world and it's notoriously difficult to write a happy love poem well, simply because there seems no occasion, nothing wrong enough to write about. I would suggest that the same may be true of place-poems: poets who are at home, happy in their place and in no danger of losing it, have no occasion to write about it and if they do, are not liable to write very memorably. (Someone is about to object "but what about so-and-so the famed, rooted, brilliant place-poet?" but bear with me, we shall come to him presently.) Just as love poems tend to be most memorable and successful when they concern love unconsummated, disappointed or recalled from the past, so a sense of place becomes keenest and most powerful when the place it relates to is not possessed but desired, not present but recalled, not here but there. "I wish I were in Carrickfergus", as the old folk-song says. And why is the place in this Arthur Waley translation of an anonymous first-century BC Chinese poem so haunting?

In a narrow road where there was not room to pass

My carriage met the carriage of a young man,

And while his axle was touching my axle

In the narrow road I asked him where he lived.

"The place where I live is easy to find,

Easy to find and hard to forget.

The gates of my house are built of yellow gold,

The hall of my house is paved with white jade.

On the hall table flagons of wine are set,

I have summoned to serve me dancers of Han-t'an.

In the middle of the courtyard grows a cassia tree,

And candles on its branches flaring away in the night" ("Meeting in the Road": 170 Chinese Poems). 

Even if we do not happen to know, as a Chinese reader of the time would, that in Chinese myth there is a cassia tree on the moon, this strange encounter in the midst of a busy city is irresistibly beckoning, and surely it is because the place is elsewhere, the mysterious young man or god not surrounded by the beauty he describes but somehow exiled from the place so hard to forget. "Ich am of Irlaunde", says his cousin in the Middle English 13th-century poem, inviting us to come and dance in that "holy londe" where he or she clearly is not.

Now dispossessed of the great sea

- Charles Causley: "Sorel Point"

Charles Causley spent most of his life rooted in the Cornish village of Launceston, not of his own volition; like many a child whose father died in the Great War, he later found himself providing emotional and financial support to a widowed mother. But if the first world war eventually confined him, the second temporarily made a globetrotter of him, for he joined the navy and saw service all over the world, for six years which were to become the keynote of his poetry. He lived into his mid-eighties, but decades after that six years, his imagery, vocabulary, subject matter were still haunted by his time in the navy and by a constantly expressed longing for the sea. "Return to Cornwall" optimistically begins

I think no longer of the antique city

Of Pompey and the red-haired Alexander

- but in the next verse, in the midst of an attempt to evoke Cornwall, "the children build their harbour in the meadow", a parenthesis creeps in: 

(O the cypress trees of Mahomed Ali Square!)

The fact that his heart was elsewhere, on the great sea of which he felt himself dispossessed and in the places where it had taken him, did not prevent him observing very clearly the place where he found himself; it never seems to. One might suppose that a writer hankering after the place where he was not would find his attention distracted from the one where he was, but if anything the opposite seems to happen, rather as it does with children growing up bilingual, whose progress with language acquisition is if anything helped by learning to think in two tongues at once. In Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote both his unforgettable evocation of "The Beach of Falesa":

I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting, but still broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled like a diamond. The land breeze blew in our faces, and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla: other things besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me sneezing

and Catriona, in which the streets of Edinburgh come to life as if he had walked them the day before. The narrator of "The Beach of Falesa", Wiltshire the copra-trader, is himself a displaced person. A wanderer like his creator in an environment and culture that did not breed him, he belongs nowhere in particular until marriage and parenthood root him. At the end of the story he is living with his Polynesian wife, having given up on his dream of returning "home" and opening a pub, and the only worry on his mind is how his half-Polynesian children are going to find a place to belong in the world.

Home is made for coming from, for dreams of going to,
Which with any luck will never come true

-  Alan J Lerner: "Wand'rin' Star"

It would of course have been a disaster had Mr Wiltshire indeed gone "home" and opened his pub. For there never was a truer word growled than by Mr Marvin: going back to a once-loved place after a long time away is a recipe for disappointment (and some fine poems), and this is because places, at least as far as people are concerned, exist in time and context. However much we may love a place for its landscape, its light, or anything else intrinsic, it will also, in our minds, be the place where we grew up, or fell in love, or were happy in our work, and we can no more return to that place than we can step twice into the same river, as Heraclitus puts it; time and the current have moved on. Any change in the place that we recall – a missing tree, a new building – is likely to strike us as a change for the worse, simply because when it was in its former state we were younger, which for any species subject to death is a good enough reason to prefer the old to the new. I think this can even be true of rooted writers, for he who stays in one place all his life is eventually liable to find himself mentally living in the version of it which he knew from his childhood or youth. George Mackay Brown was such a writer, who regarded even the advent of a nearby Co-op as a potential disaster for his beloved Stromness. His fictional name for it was Hamnavoe, which had been its name in Viking times, and the undoubted keenness of his vision of the Stromness where he lived is shot through with an elegiac longing for the Hamnavoe that had gone before his time: even this most apparently rooted of writers was in his way an exile.

And it may be worse if the place doesn't change at all, for we shall be the more conscious of the changes in ourselves, like A E Housman, ruefully reflecting on the fair where once in his youth he stood and looked at things he couldn't afford:

Now times are altered: if I care

To buy a thing, I can.

The pence are here, and here's the fair,

But where's the lost young man?

In his later years, freed of responsibilities, Charles Causley took to globetrotting again and wrote of his travels in Canada, Europe, Australia. And how did he get to all these places? Why, he flew… granted, some of them were long-haul trips but he was in no hurry. I think he was cannily avoiding any return to the sea, the place from which exile had so inspired him. This place, after all, was not just "the sea" but the sea in the early1940s, in wartime, from the point of view of a sailor in the Royal Navy, and to that place, and that version of himself, that lost young man, he could not return.

Therefore when a person says, I am well and wish to be well, or I am rich and wish to be rich, and I desire simply to have what I have - to him we shall reply: "You, my friend, having wealth and health and strength, want to have the continuance of them; […]. And when you say, I desire that which I have and nothing else, is not your meaning that you want to retain what you now have in the future? […]Then, said Socrates, he and every one who desires, desires that which he has not already, and which is future and not present, and which he has not, and is not, and of which he is in want?"

- Plato: The Symposium

I suggested earlier that lost or unrequited love produces more powerful writing than the fulfilled kind, and that displacement is similarly more productive than rootedness. Yet there are writers who celebrate fulfilled love, and rootedness in a loved place. I think it is Plato who gives us the key to how they manage that. For when I said "poets who are at home, happy in their place and in no danger of losing it, have no real occasion to write about it" I was surely, in the italicised words, posing a condition that can't exist. The ending of the love story, "and they got married and lived happily ever after" is incomplete: it should read "and lived happily ever after until one of them died". In the same way, we are all not only in danger of losing the place we live in but utterly certain to, unless we have found the secret of eternal life.

No poet is more conscious of this than Louise Glück, and none has a keener sense of the world she lives in, for it is the bitterest of ironies that the more sensitive you are to the beauty of the world, the more agonising is the thought of losing it. If Causley was unusual in that his beloved locality was the entire ocean, she is even more so, for hers is the planet: which particular bit she inhabited would make no odds to the anguish of the narrative voice in "October", so conscious of each manifestation of beauty

Sunrise. A film of moisture

on each living thing. Pools of cold light

formed in the gutters

and simultaneously conscious that

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.

The light of autumn: you will not be spared. 

(Averno)

In "Arboretum", from The Seven Ages, she confronts head-on our longing to stay for ever in the loved place

We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger[…]

merely wishing to linger, to be, to be here

and the logical consequence of this apparently harmless take-up of space by those who ask

so little of the world; small things seemed to us

immense wealth. merely to smell once more the early roses

in the arboretum; we asked

so little, and we claimed nothing. And the young

withered nevertheless.

But knowing a thing is so makes it no easier to accept; it is a condition of humanity that growing to love the temporary, which "place", for us, will always be, brings grief.

I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me

to love the world, making it impossible

to turn away completely, to shut it out completely

ever again-

it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,

birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:

you mean to take it away

- "Vespers": The Wild Iris

In the end, I think that to be completely rooted and at ease in a place, a writer would need to live in the moment, with little or no sense of that place's context in time, its past and future - or indeed his own. Such a writer Constantine Cavafy emphatically was not: when he walks the streets of early twentieth-century Alexandria, he plainly wouldn't be surprised to bump into Mark Antony or the Emperor Julian round the corner, for their times and their versions of Alexandria are as real and vivid to him as his own. Two of his most famous poems concern a loved place, and at the heart of both is Plato's sense that love is less for what we have than for what we have not. In "The God Abandons Antony", a man's luck and the whole shape of his life are figured in the city, his and Cavafy's own Alexandria, a place and a time fusing into a moment the more precious because it is about to be over, because it is time to "say goodbye to her, Alexandria you are losing". In "Ithaka", the loved place is a memory but also a goal, the home made for coming from and for dreams of going to. And Cavafy's advice is clear: we had better "hope the journey is a long one", for the best thing our dream destination can offer us is the journey there.

Review of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, pub Bloomsbury 2017

The first thing I'd say is, give it a chance. It does look puzzling at first; the narrative techniques he is using are not immediately clear. But they become so, pretty quickly, and it is worth sticking with the story through the initial puzzlement because it soon becomes very moving.   

You might also want to look up "bardo"; leastways, I'd never heard of it. It turns out to be a Buddhist concept meaning "an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth". I'm not altogether certain that this is exactly what it means here, because there is no hint of rebirth; rather, the bardo seems to be a sort of waiting room for people whose remains of consciousness won't allow them to admit to themselves that they are finally, irrevocably, dead. 

Indeed this refusal seems wholly understandable, for at the back of this whole novel is the intrinsic unfairness of death, the arbitrary wiping out of a conscious, feeling personality. None of the souls we meet in the bardo (which seems to be bounded by the cemetery fence) had finished with life: all had reason to want to stay in the world of the living. Hans Vollman was looking forward to consummating his marriage when a beam fell on his head; Roger Bevins, just after he slit his wrists following an unhappy affair, realised the extreme beauty of the world and how much more he craved of it. Elise Traynor, dead at 14, is tormented by thoughts of the sexual and emotional life she never lived to have: "and the choise being made, it would be rite, and would become Love, and Love would become baby, and that is all I ask". Which doesn't seem much to ask.
 

If death is unfair on the dead, it is equally so on the bereaved, and this is where Lincoln comes in, for his 11-year-old son Willie has just died, and even in the middle of a war, with people criticising his policy and vilifying him personally right and left, this is a catastrophe to put all others in the shade. The action moves between real life, in the days just before and after Willie's death, and the world of the bardo, the souls hanging on at the edge of consciousness. The narrative in the bardo is carried by the speech or thought of several different narrators, while that in real-life consists of extracts from historical books and papers (most are factual, a few are not).  One thing this technique does is to show how subjective is historical truth; there is one short but telling chapter about a particular occasion, a party at the White House, which consists entirely of quotes from different guests about the moonlight that evening. There was no moon at all, or a crescent, or a full moon; it was silver, golden, green, blue…. not for nothing do policemen say there is no one less reliable than an eyewitness.

Lincoln, musing in the cemetery where he comes to visit his son's coffin, articulates the pain that has always occupied human minds: " Trap. Horrible trap. At one's birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget."

When the souls in the bardo are troubled by the thought that they might actually be dead (they prefer to think of themselves as sick), they cite their own consciousness in support of their belief: "To whom do you speak? I said. Who is hearing you?" This form of words recurs, and it puts me in mind of a poem of Paulus Silentiarius in the Greek Anthology, a universal epitaph which takes the form of a dialogue between the dead person (or perhaps the words on his tomb) and the living reader of those words. It ends with a question from the living person to the dead:
 

Who are you that speak,
To whom do you speak?

The poem is bleak, implying that what one was in life matters very little after death. The novel on the other hand seeks for some redemptive factor in the "horrible trap". It might be the sense Lincoln's own grief gives him of communion with the grief of others:

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow, toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that all were suffering, that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content, all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood) and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact, that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time.
 

It might also be Roger Bevins's ecstatic sense of the smallest details of life, which causes him to manifest as a being with innumerable eyes, ears, noses and hands, the better to experience them, or the way in which Betsy Baron, alcoholic and inadequate parent, eventually manages to see herself clearly. When her form flickers between all the things she was in life plus those she never attained – "attentive mother, mindful baker of bread and cakes" – there is a sense that these things too were a part of her, even though they were never manifested in life. At the end, one of the bardo-ghosts, temporarily inhabiting Lincoln's body along with him, slips for a moment into that of his horse and immediately feels at one with the animal as well. It is this sense of shared consciousness, experience, destiny, that most lingers from the novel.

Review of The Intriguing Life and Ignominious Death of Maurice Benyovszky

Review of The Intriguing Life and Ignominious Death of Maurice Benyovszky, by Andrew Drummond, pub. Routledge 2018

"It Made His Story A Little Suspicious"

Just so we know where we are. Andrew Drummond is a novelist with a background in languages and history. His adult novels to date have all been set in the past and combine surprising but true historical facts with a wildly inventive and slightly deranged imagination. Now he has written a genuine history book, published by Routledge no less, with proper sources, index an' all, but luckily nobody told him he should make it academic and dull, so he has written it as he does his novels, ie with a pleasantly pawky sense of humour (the chapter headings, of which the above is one, are all quotes from historical sources and include "Short And Incomplete, It Is Written With A Bias"  and "Foreign Paper With Horizontal Writing", among others). Oh, and the nominal subject is an historical figure with a wildly inventive and slightly deranged imagination.

It is set in 18th-century Russia, as was his novel Novgorod the Great (also distinguished by its eccentric chapter headings) and concerns both the actual life and the memoirs of the eponymous Maurice. Benyovszky was one of those fantasists, like the Welsh sailor-author Tristan Jones, who genuinely did lead a life full of adventures but who felt driven, and entitled, to embellish them. However, Jones was basically quite an amiable character, while Benyovszky was not. He resembles far more closely a fantasist who came, like himself, from eastern Europe and was known as Jan Hoch until he changed his name to Robert Maxwell.

Benyovszky's actual life bears only a passing resemblance to his memoirs, as becomes apparent when Drummond interweaves them with those of other eyewitnesses to events. These are sometimes fascinating characters in their own right, especially Ivan Ryumin, clerk, and Benyovszky's polar opposite, a conscientious recorder of facts with a positive mania for counting and listing things. His "Description of the capital city of Paris", in full, is a list of numbers – streets ("excluding alleys"), nunneries, bridges, street lights and much, much else. I took greatly to Ryumin and was massively pleased at how things turned out for him.

The events of the book centre on a daring, and historical, mass escape of prisoners from Siberia and what happened to them afterwards, which was exciting enough though nowhere near as exciting as Benyovszky makes it. But its real theme, I think, is truth, and how fiction gets made out of it. Translation plays a big part in this, often acting more as a barrier than as an entry into another culture – as when someone, translating a French description of an island, mistranslates "inhabité" as "inhabited" when in fact it means the reverse – an error which could have meant life or death to any sailor relying on the information. At one point, Drummond finds himself citing a book called Description of the Land of Kamchatka by Stefan Krasheninnikov, published in 1755. It was translated into English by James Grieve in 1764. Grieve had lived in Russia for 30 years, so should have been well qualified to translate such a work, but he had an interesting notion of a translator's rights and responsibilities:

"The third part of this work has been most considerably abridged, as in treating of the manner, customs and religion of this barbarous nation it was loaded with absurd practices, idle ceremonies and unaccountable superstitions. Sufficient examples of all these have been retained to shew the precise state of an unpolished, credulous and grossly ignorant people."

This is, of course, not only the translator as liar but the filtering of a culture through colonialist eyes, another way in which reality becomes distorted and one which becomes more important as the book progresses. I don't want to give away too much, because the actual facts, and fictions, and downright lies, are so much fun for a reader to discover. You couldn't make it up, except where Benyovszky did.

Review of Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

"People can change their minds about little things but on the big ones, they'd rather die first. A used-up planet scares the piss out of them, after they spent their whole lives thinking the cupboard would never go bare."

It's incredibly hard to write a novel on Current Issues without making it sound like a lecture or a sermon. One mistake many authors make is to forget that the heart of a novel, the reason readers persist with it, is never The Issues but rather the characters: if these are no more than a peg to hang issues on, readers will soon be off elsewhere.

Kingsolver is too old a hand to make this error: it would be very hard not to get involved with Willa, wondering why, when she and her husband have done everything "right" – steady jobs, family, etc – they now, in 2016, haven't a spare penny to bless themselves with and stop their house falling down. Or with Thatcher Greenwood, in 1871, trapped in the wrong marriage and trying to teach proper science in a school whose principal still believes in Noah's Ark.

For Thatcher lived over a century before Willa, albeit on the same plot of land, and their stories alternate and interlace. This is the other device whereby Kingsolver manages to come at her message obliquely rather than head-on. One thing Thatcher and Willa have in common is that both live in times when people are frightened of the new and try to cling to old certainties, even when this means ignoring evidence and trusting to faith, or instinct. But it is Thatcher, back in 1871, who witnesses a demonstration against a Darwinist in Boston:

the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey's tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up!

and Thatcher's boss who begins little notes with "Fact!" before citing lies.

Thatcher and Willa do not seek intellectual shelter in comforting myths, but they cling to other, emotional, shelters: he to a marriage that is going nowhere and she to the hope of financial security for her family (and incidentally, if British readers ever doubted the importance of the NHS, Kingsolver's account of Willa's problems getting care for her ailing father-in-law should convince them). Even Willa's daughter Tig (short for Antigone, her father is Greek), who has figured out that there is little point in getting attached to material things when "the world is running out of the stuff we need", is not immune from seeking shelter in caring for her half-orphaned infant nephew. Without shelter, the novel says, we stand in daylight, but we also feel extremely vulnerable. The only person in the novel who arguably does do without shelter of any kind is Thatcher's scientist friend Mary Treat (an historical person).

Willa's security is in material possessions, what her daughter calls "stuff", and not till close to the end does she realise that the more stuff there is, the better chance that whatever of it really matters will get lost, swallowed up in the mass of the inconsequential.  It would be wrong to betray to potential readers how the various protagonists eventually decide to confront their problems. I will say one thing. I have heard some folk who have been listening to the radio dramatisation, which I've been avoiding since I hadn't yet read the book, and who have been disappointed. Don't judge the book by the adaptation.  It's the first novel I have read which not only addresses recent political events but reaches beyond them to what Tig, representing a new generation, sees as the root cause, a world no longer adequate to the consumer demands being made on it:

"There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they're scared. […] Total fantasy. I mean, look around, who do you see that's living la vida white man? Really it's just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last?"

Just as she did in The Lacuna, Kingsolver has written a Great American Novel for our time, but not just for America. It is both powerful and uncomfortable, because the solution, if there still is one, doesn't just involve changing one set of politicians for another, but rather one lifestyle and set of life goals for another.

is there a fix for this?

LJ folk, these days when i link from somewhere else, like FB or twitter, to one of my LJ posts it no longer shows with the relevant title and picture, just as some generic cartoon mouse with "(no title)" underneath. The actual link still works fine when folk click on it, but I'd prefer it to show in a post the way it used to. Anything I can do?

Review of Sharps Cabaret by Katy Giebenhain, pub. Mercer University Press 2017

I've often admitted to a special fondness for émigré poets, because they seem to have a sharper, less habituated way of looking at things and because they see their new surroundings through the prism of the old, which makes things more interesting. Expats never feel as if they have a comfort zone, they write from an edge, like people observing but on the verge of leaving.

Well, here we have one who identifies, in two poems, as an "ex-expatriate" – someone who has spent a long time away from her place of birth, then returned to it. If anything, this is even more interesting, because of course the person who returns cannot be the same as the one who left, and whatever she experienced elsewhere will change her viewpoint on what she once thought she knew.

It also means she is never fully at home anywhere. In "The Accidental German" she is a transplanted American who

         gets sentimental
         for Methodist Churches, rodeo queens
         and motel ice machines

while in "Another Ex-Expatriate" she is

          an emigrant back with a prodigal sigh
          and half a heart across the sea.

There's no way to solve this conundrum, but as a writer you wouldn't want to; it is too fruitful.

Another defining characteristic of hers is a lightness of touch on essentially serious matters. Deracination, language, a life-threatening illness, all are treated with an entire absence of solemnity. It isn't humour exactly, more a cosmic sense of proportion, that enables her, in "James Bond and the Type 1 Diabetic Bridesmaid", to see the medical paraphernalia of diabetes as the emergency gadgets Q tends to lay out before 007 in the films:

          She's ruled some things out:
          the knife holder from Chinatown
          now unstrapped from her thigh,
          jellybeans hand-sewn to bra straps,
          elastic candy wristlets
          to bite at the slightest low.

A similarly audacious metaphor turns "Miss Hydraulic Fracturing", which could so easily have been preachy, into a delight:

          Here she is-
          Strip Mining's half-sister
          just come to our school
          with sleek hair and old tricks […]

          she has football players
          in her bed
          she has school board members
          in her bed.

          she's not her, of course,
          the half-sister we know
          but listen, watch
          you can tell they're kin-

          here we go, here we go again.

In "Hunting Season", American deer "throw themselves at cars" like the Rhineland sailors who were said to throw themselves from boats under the Lorelei's spell. This looks like the strangest metaphor yet, but the Rhineland is where the ex-expatriate has been, and now a near-miss between animal and car leads to a meditation on various kinds of "touching but not-quite-meeting"; strangers brushing past in the subway, a shark's shadow in the water uncomfortably close.

          How startling it is, when space
          is not wholly yours
          the way you thought it was.

That juxtaposition, and the observation it leads to, are so the kind of thing I have come to expect of expat poets, and am always happy to find. The "sharps" of the title poem are hypodermic needles, but it's an adjective that can equally apply to the observation and language here.

Review of We Will Be Free! The Bread & Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2018 Ed Mike Quille,

This is an anthology of poems chosen from entries to a competition for poems on "themes relevant to working class life, politics, communities and culture". It was judged by Andy Croft of the publisher Smokestack and Mary Sayer of the Unite union.

Themed anthologies are odd beasts. Their big advantage is that they can appeal to readers who might not normally think poetry had much to say to them, or know where to begin with it – indeed they are, unless totally inept, pretty much sure to appeal to readers who share the anthology's particular interest. This reaching out to an unaccustomed audience is a worthwhile thing to attempt, though whether it succeeds would depend, I suppose, as much on the publisher's promotion skills as on the product. The themed anthology has drawbacks too, and most of them depend on the kind of theme chosen. If the theme is narrow in scope, the poems can be too repetitive and unvarying. This is not a problem here, for the theme is a pretty wide one. If the theme is in any way political, religious or ecological, the tone can soon start to sound preachy, and this is a problem in some poems here.

The one problem I think nearly all themed anthologies have is that, because the criteria for inclusion embrace theme as well as intrinsic merit, the content tends to be of more uneven quality than would be the case in an anthology chosen on poetic skill alone. Again this depends on how wide the potential pool was: there has been enough good poetry written on the theme of, say, the Great War to fill several anthologies. Here, the pool was the 800 competition entries. Going by the late Leslie Norris's estimate that, in competitions he'd judged, about 10% of the entries were in serious contention, this should have yielded about 80 poems of interest. In fact this pamphlet contains 23, and not all of them would make my cut, but then judging does contain some very personal elements.

The best, for my money, are those that approach their subject subtly, from an angle. This might be a metaphor, like football in Helen Burke's "The Match", which depicts its subjects

Stood outside the ground
Most of us.
Trying to get a ticket for our own lives.

Or it might be via a focus on one individual, as in Jim Mainland's "The Carpenter", celebrating the work of Francesco Tuccio of Lampedusa, who makes crosses out of driftwood and wreckage to commemorate refugees who died en route and celebrate those who survive. This poem's vocabulary shimmers with delicate allusion: Tuccio genuinely is a carpenter and the implications of a carpenter who makes crosses cannot be missed, but the reader is not bludgeoned with them. We are trusted to pick up throwaway references to

an ecumenical gathering
of hooks, screws, pins, tacks, staples, rivets, nails

and

gaudy, misshapen, blistered, sea-sucked
wreckage that is already reliquary

until the powerful ending, in which the cross itself turns into an image:

a tree out-branched, upright on the level plain,
a raised hand to haul you from hostile waters.

Steve Pottinger's poem "Glass collector" is another that derives its strength from its focus on an individual, who defies people's preconceptions about him, and from a play on the word "space". Again this succeeds because it is concerned not only to get its theme across but to use words well and memorably – the best way, by far, to get any theme across, if only polemicists would realise it. Could there be a more pointed or economical way to achieve what Owen Gallagher's Glaswegian narrator does in his coinage of "right hoorable" for "right honourable"?

There were several other poems that impressed me in places, though some were, I thought, itching for an editor. A few fell into the category of "carefully observed memories of childhood", a genre I generally find workmanlike rather than exciting, though this may be a personal taste. And a few were just too angry for their own good and ended up sputtering rather than speaking. The introduction mentioned with approval the "passionate" nature of the poems: passion is fine when controlled by intellect and distance, but if passion is allowed to take over a poem, verbal skill tends to take its leave.

I don't think you would need to identify as working-class to find things to like in this anthology, though you'd almost certainly need to be on the left of politics. The feeling of being preached at is there in fewer poems than I had feared it might be, and the best of the poems, about a third of them, are surely worth the modest £5 price-tag. It can be bought here

Two Gs in "bugger off"

A recent FB post by a friend got me thinking how much time I have spent, as a writer, doing things I didn't really want to get sucked into, just because it's so hard to say no. I suspect, from that and other posts, that other writers also find it a problem. Now that I am older and wilier I have collected a few tips about avoiding this, and here they are:

1. The most vital - NEVER agree to discuss anything on the phone. There is more than one reason for this; unless you record it, you will have no proof of what was said, which will be awkward if the caller happens to be, say, an unscrupulous journalist who will twist your words, or an entrepreneur who is good at forgetting promises and denying he ever made them (met both). But my main reason is that it's far harder to say no to a voice in your ear than to an email. Old and wily as I am, I got caught like this fairly recently by a man who insisted on ringing, then badgered me into agreeing to his use of a poem I didn't really want used. If ever anyone says "Oh, I'd much rather talk on the phone, we will understand each other so much better than in writing", remember that what he is really saying is "It will be easier for me to get my own way". Tell him you have hearing loss or a terrible phone line/memory and INSIST on email or snailmail.

2. If it's something the enquirer should be paying you for, mention money very early in the proceedings. Don't just assume they will, because it's quite possible they won't and will hope to get you for nothing. If the mere mention of money sends them scuttling, all the better; at least you haven't wasted your time doing any free work. It took me half a lifetime to forget my mother's belief that it was rude to mention money. It isn't if you want to get your hands on any.

3. If you have a blog and do reviews, folk will ask you to review their books. I don't mind these requests. You see books you might otherwise miss and I enjoy writing reviews anyway. What I don't enjoy is feeling obliged to, and if a small publisher sends me an actual book copy, I feel: well, this has cost them a copy and postage, I really must review it even if I can't think of much to say. My solution to this is to ask enquirers to send an electronic copy instead. I don't mind reading onscreen, and when I know it hasn't cost them anything, I feel better about emailing back, if necessary, "sorry but I don't think I'm the right reviewer for this".

There you are - gratis, the stratagems of a chronically shy person who cannot actually echo Gideon from Local Hero in saying "and are there two Gs in "bugger off?" but who thinks it quite a lot...

Review of The Clockwork Crow by Catherine Fisher, pub. Firefly

Be careful going up the stair.
Someone's left their shadow there.

An orphan. A mystery. An old house with a grumpy housekeeper. Something that shouldn't be able to talk, but can. Snow. Supernatural beings with evil intent. Looking for a Christmas present for an intelligent youngster? Look no further, but buy this early, because you're going to want to read it a couple of times yourself before wrapping it – once very quickly, to find out what happens next, and then more slowly, to savour the prose, the tension, the winter descriptions, the world-building. Allegedly this is a children's book, and I mean children's, not YA. But then so was Masefield's The Midnight Folk and I still re-read that….

I suppose its intended audience shows most clearly in the linear narrative; there is only one point-of-view character, the girl Seren, and we are with her throughout, whereas in Fisher's YA novels, there are liable to be two or three narrative threads going on at any one time, and we shift between them. The intended audience, however, makes no odds to the depth of character; people in a Fisher novel are never two-dimensional or easily pigeonholed. Seren, the protagonist, is as spiky and independent as most of Fisher's young heroines, and her confederate the Crow is even more so – their tart, combative exchanges are a joy and the final revelation of his identity beautifully apt.

Nor does the targeted age-group result in any noticeable simplification of the vocabulary; Fisher doesn't believe in talking down to readers. The book is set in the Victorian past where carriages still coexist with railways, and life in the house itself harks back yet further:

Immediately Seren jumped from her chair and ran to the sideboard. It was full of small brown drawers marked with old-fashioned labels. Barley Sugar, Cocoa and Chocolate, All Sorts of Seeds, Isinglass Shavings, Heartsease. She pulled them open hastily. They contained spicy mixtures smelling sharp and pungent, but none of them were what she wanted. Then on a shelf she saw a small flask labelled Oil of Cloves.

The labels are perfect for evoking a past time (who could resist All Sorts of Seeds?) but if child readers want to know what isinglass or heartsease are, they can go and find out. It's part of the experience, their own interaction with mystery. I should think child readers would probably be intrigued by the subtle time indicators – dresses bought as material and made up at home, dedicated bathrooms that are a novelty suggestive of considerable wealth. They would also be enchanted by the wintry atmosphere (I sometimes wonder if there is any limit to the number of ways Fisher can conjure up cold; probably not). And they would surely love the textual illustrations – crows perched on the chapter headings, stars scattered across the corners of pages. Though I may say that on my first reading, I failed to notice these, because I was too busy speed-reading, being wild to discover how it turned out.