Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 2

Review of Chalking the Pavement by Kate Noakes, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2024

This us a Covid-themed pamphlet consisting of both poems and a long prose piece called “Field Notes 2020”. I think this is a piece of prose as opposed to a prose poem, partly because it is left-hand justified, and as far as I know, prose poems are justified both sides, but also because it does indeed read like notes in a journal, intended for shaping into poems later. Phrases like “Swallows fire themselves across the sky; bright crossbows; trigger-tight wings” leap out of the surrounding prose for all the world like the start of a poem, but prove not to be one.

This isn’t meant as a criticism, because after thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that it is quite deliberate. “Field Notes 2020” comes very early in the pamphlet; it describes mainly the early months of the pandemic (when the poet was herself ill), and its stop-start, slightly unshaped, unfinished feel seems to reflect the uncertainty of the time: the way enterprises and intentions are frustrated and come, if not to nothing, at least to less than they otherwise might. There are many moments of beauty or happiness, like the “surprising kestrel hovering in rosy-blue”, but they are just that, fleeting moments. And many involve not the present, but memory or anticipation. In this context, “notes for future poems” seems an appropriate device.

If that is so, one would expect the succeeding poems to be considerably more shaped and polished, which indeed they are. The ones that work best for me are those that go beyond the actual pandemic, to find the universal in the particular, and the standout among these is “Ponies At The Airport”, with its echoes of Edwin Muir’s “The Horses”. Muir was describing the aftermath of an imaginary apocalyptic war, with humans not only deprived of modern technology but having come to mistrust it, and returning to their ancient partnership with horses. In Noakes’s poem, the ponies are real, grazing

  between Heathrow’s hangers and cargo sheds,  
 on the edge of its runways  
 and by the acres of standing planes.

It isn’t likely, as the poet implicitly recognises, that this state of affairs will continue as it does in Muir’s poem, not when empty planes still fly and engines are kept in tune. But the hint of a different future is there: the horses

  stamp and graze on through wet and fine.  
 Their grass may churn to mud, but they are there,  
 ready, whenever we want them.

There are some unfortunate typos that could usefully be corrected if these poems end up in a full collection –  “an short” (The Sick Spring), “passed” for “past” in “I am brushed passed “ – (Field Notes), “before the engines arrives.” – (Source: A Car Fire), “summised” for “surmised” in ”On coming across John Snow’s grave in Brompton Cemetery during a pandemic”.  That last is a pity, occurring as it does in another poem that successfully goes beyond the here and now to another epidemic, the cholera of the nineteenth century.

On the whole, this pamphlet does a good job of chronicling the period without sounding self-pitying or self-righteous. It was a period that many, including me, have no great wish to remember, and one result of that is my dilemma when reading “Countless Pyres, 2021”. This describes hastily-arranged mass funerals:

   Every day, thousands of bodies
  are stacked at the edge
  of the funeral grounds, each
  wrapped in white linen.

   All day masked priests work at
   fast ceremonies and rapid prayers
   till they too are fit to drop.

When I first read this, I took it to be another instance of going beyond the particular, comparing the pandemic to the Black Death, because despite the date in the title, I couldn’t recall any such mass burials happening during Covid. I still do think this, but have to recognise that this might have happened, I just can’t recall for sure if it did or not, which says a lot about how many memories from that time I have blocked. Unlike Noakes, I didn’t keep “field notes” from the time; perhaps one day I’ll wish I had…

Review of From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis, pub. Carcanet 2024

   they can’t get the taste of terracotta
  out of their mouths
  they know they came from mud

   that only yesterday
  they were a substance
  to be walked on – “Maker”

What comes most strongly through this collection is a preoccupation with what we are, where we came from and what we shall become.  It is haunted by Old Testament and Eastern myths, the quest of Gilgamesh and the meditations of Omar Khayyam. As always with re-imaginings, the changes the author makes to her original tell us a lot about where she is coming from. For instance, in the “Wake!” poems, a “re-imagining” of the Rubaiyat, she renders the lines “And in your joyous errand reach the spot/where I made One” as “find the quiet spot where I became one with the universe”. This has to be a conscious divergence; Fitzgerald, and, if memory serves, Omar, was using the phrase “where I made One” to mean “where I was present” (as in “he made one of the party”), but Lewis gives it a pantheistic, or perhaps atomistic, turn, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s rocks and stones and trees.

The same interconnectedness happens in “Fox in a Frosty Field”, where “grief connects with other griefs, unmanageable and random, they cluster, form chains like protein”. This is a meditation on memories and experiences, how they shape and alter each other and even appropriate each other’s effects, so that the grief we cannot express for one loss is transferred to some other event:

     How that fox on the road to the garden centre had a ruff of its own red innards     round its  neck.

     How I cried for it, and also for my mother-in-law who I once helped to buy a fur   stole.

It may also not be fanciful to see this fascination with interconnectedness in the collection’s formal aspects; the repetitions, patterns of rhyme, chain-forms like the pantoum. Lewis uses this kind of form very skilfully, as in “Fair Ground”, where the deceptive simplicity of what is almost a nursery rhyme masks a dark and serious point.

      The men are riding the roundabout.
     Their bearded faces go up and down.
     It’s such a laugh, they giggle aloud.
     Their eyes glitter with harmless fun.

      their bearded faces go up and down.
     Happy as children let out of school.
     Their eyes glitter with harmless fun.
     They love to go on the ferris wheel.

     Happy as children let out of school.
    Only boys are allowed to be scholars.
    They love to go on the ferris wheel.
    Girls are mourning their books and rulers.

And how artful that title, not “Fairground” but “Fair Ground”, typical of this poet’s exactness.

This poem also demonstrates how, despite its mythological roots, the collection is also very conscious of contemporary events. Indeed in “How can we comfort each other when we can’t comfort them”, the last sentence is alarmingly prescient:

      How can we comfort each other  if we can’t comfort them?  
     What right have we to be living when they are only offered
      a choice of endings

      by whatever powers of hell come out of the dark pavilions of the terrible,
     death-delivering sky – and I am being forced to allow it? Let there be no
     building on the mass graves of innocents.

I admit to not “getting” what the poem “Another way of saying it” is trying to do, and in “Guinevere”, the image of her “polishing the round table, over and over, wanting praise” threw me a bit; I can’t help thinking queens had staff for that sort of thing. But this is peripheral to the collection’s powerful, haunting theme. The last poem, “The Bat”, harks back to an earlier poem that ends “We are the stuff of unexploded stars”, a line that again put me in mind of Lucretius and the atomists:

     you died there alone and this is true of all flesh,
    whether in or out of the sun, the end comes

     and with the end
     comes darkness, and with darkness

     the beginnings of stars.

Review of Twilight Cities, by Katherine Pangonis, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023

“These cities are palimpsests, with layer upon layer of history, culture and identity drawn over one another, each obscuring the last but with glimpses stealing through.”

This is a study of five Mediterranean cities, Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch, not “lost” in the sense of being completely submerged or vanished, but in the sense of being decayed from their former grandeur. Tyre is now a quiet fishing port, with a lot of antiquity submerged just off the coast; what little is left of Carthage is absorbed in a suburb of modern Tunis; Syracuse has been through a period of heavy industrialisation and Antioch, like its modern incarnation Antakya, has been devastated by a series of earthquakes. Ravenna, alone of the five, is still more or less where it was and still relatively important, albeit as a centre for art rather than the western capital of the Roman empire, but its relevance to the theme will presently appear.

The question the book raises is, what causes a city to go into decline like this, and it becomes apparent that there is no one answer.  Being plagued with earthquakes won’t cause it alone; if the site is sufficiently desirable, people will come back and rebuild. On the other hand, a site desirably located for purposes of trade or defence will accordingly be desired by many, and may change hands correspondingly often, with violent consequences. Again though, the conquerors will usually have wanted it enough to rebuild on the ruins they have made, as the Romans did in Carthage.  A harbour silting up, or a trade route changing, can have more catastrophic effects.

The word “capitals” in the title is no accident; all these were once national or regional capitals, and losing that status was often the first step on a downward spiral – Syracuse lost out to Palermo in that way.  All have been ruinously fought over; all subject to natural disasters. But in many ways it is their differences that are more interesting. Modern Tyre still clings to its ancient “Phoenician” identity, to a sometimes alarming extent:

“Phoenicianism’, as it has become known, was championed by various political parties following the creation of modern Lebanon, most notably those with Christian and Druze leaders. This took on a darker side during the devastating civil war from 1975 to 1989, when ‘New Phoenicianism’ was picked up by far-right Christian militias and used as a way of differentiating the Christians from the Muslims, taking on a distinctly racist current.”

Yet in Tunis, descended from Tyre’s daughter-city of Carthage, the author remarks, “During my time in Carthage, I do not meet a single Tunisian who describes themselves as Phoenician”.

And the artists of modern Ravenna whom she quotes seem if anything to resent the dead hand of “history, which dwarfs everything the city is in the modern day. That trumps the reality of the city. It’s a mistake. Ravenna is so much more than her history, but you grow up with these ghosts”. Marco Miccoli, a skater and street art curator from Ravenna each year creates an exhibition in honour of Dante. ‘People are only interested, we only get permission, if it’s about Dante’.

Some of the book’s most powerful moments do in fact come from the juxtaposition of past and present. In Tyre she notes, “There is a second archaeological site just south of the modern city. This is where the most extensive excavations have taken place, revealing the necropolis, churches and the magnificent hippodrome. Directly adjacent stands the Palestinian refugee camp of Al-Bass. This ghetto is part of the city’s identity, and as I walked through the necropolis, the ramshackle buildings and barbed-wire fences loomed over me. One forgotten people beside so many more. Some of them have less private space than the dead Romans in their sepulchres.”

There is a lot of interest and information in this book, also some welcome humour “He stationed his war elephants around the edges of the city and instructed builders that wherever there was an elephant, there they should construct a tower. It is a loss to urban planning that this method of demarcation is no longer employed as part of the architectural process”. And while I knew the emperor Constans had been assassinated, I wasn’t previously aware that far from being stabbed as the usual custom was, he met his fate in the baths, bludgeoned to death with a soap dish.

I do have some quibbles. In the Ravenna section, spending pages on one of Byron’s love affairs strikes me as completely irrelevant. And like so many modern historians (particularly, I have to say, the female ones), she is too fond of bringing herself in as a character. I could especially have done without “The cave church was the first building I ‘checked on’ when I arrived in Antakya in February 2023, and when I entered to see everything exactly as it had been, I burst into tears. They were the first tears of many to be shed that day – and the only happy ones.” While I can understand her being emotional after the earthquake, I don’t need to know about it; authors can be emotional on their own time instead of embarrassing Gentle Reader with that sort of thing.

However, for most of the time this is a genuinely informative work with an interesting central concept. Living as I do on an island that was a stage on a major seaway, I appreciate an author who views the sea not as a barrier but a connection: “It was the crossing place and the meeting place: the centre of the world.” I could almost forgive the Author’s Note for beginning: “This book has been a journey”…

Review of “The Book of Hope” by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, pub. Viking 2021

Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it.

If I’m reviewing a book from a few years back, and one which must have been reviewed by the press at the time (though I confess it completely passed me by), it’s because a book advocating hope seemed rather apposite at a time when there’s a great deal of pessimism and despair about, much of it justified. In the event, I have very mixed views about it. Jane Goodall has long travelled the world giving talks about conservation, urging people not to be discouraged by the size of the problems from doing what they can. She has demonstrably done a lot of good, with initiatives like Roots & Shoots, designed to encourage individual and community action, and she is right to say that pessimism and despair can, in effect, become an excuse for doing nothing.

This book, however, is an infuriating mix of truly inspiring stories of positive action, anecdotes masquerading as evidence, wishful thinking, the sentimental and the genuinely moving, practical initiatives, interesting information and “spiritual” baloney. I don’t think it is helped by the narrative method, which involved Abrams conducting a series of interviews with Goodall. For one thing, this encourages the inclusion of much irrelevant detail – “There was coconut rice served with a creamy Swahili bean sauce; lentils and peas with a hint of ground peanuts, curry, and coriander; and sautéed spinach”: well, fascinating if you like menus, but nothing to do with the book’s theme.

Also, in order for the reader to feel the dialogue is going somewhere, Abrams feels obliged to be constantly surprised and enlightened by whatever Goodall is saying, even when one might think it was so obvious that he must surely have stumbled on the idea before. “Doesn’t it feel like a drop in the ocean, given the overwhelming autocracy or tyranny that people are facing around the world?” “But millions of drops actually make the ocean.” I smiled. Hope, checkmate.” There is too much of this: “I was beginning to see what Jane meant about the tapestry of life and the interconnection between all species.”, “Jane smiled and nodded her head, like an elder who was passing on the secrets of life and survival. I was beginning to understand.”

Often the dialogue simply feels forced and unnatural, as when they are swapping examples of political activism:

“Yes,” Jane said, “think of the early suffragette movement in England, led by Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, when the women tied themselves to the railings outside the House of Commons as they fought for women’s right to vote. And think of the number of people, all over the world, who have tied themselves to trees, or climbed up into the branches, to try to protect a forest from the bulldozers.” “Another inspiring example is Standing Rock,” I said…” This goes on for a while.

When Goodall focuses on practical initiatives, however, the book is genuinely informative and sometimes inspiring.  In China, Jia Haixia, who is blind, and Jia Wenqi, who has no legs, have together planted more than ten thousand trees to help heal the degraded and polluted land surrounding their village. Roots & Shoots, originally founded in a Tanzanian school to convince children that everyone could make a difference in the world, proved its worth when a visitor to a refugee camp noticed a strange difference in one area: “It was depressing, he said—bare earth, people with vacant expressions, children sitting listlessly outside their huts. He continued walking through the camp, and then suddenly he came to a section of the camp where the atmosphere changed. Children were running around and laughing. Hens foraged in a patch of land where grass had been allowed to grow. A few teenagers were working in a small vegetable garden.” The people in that area had been through the Roots & Shoots programme and were not inclined to sit around despondently waiting for something to happen.

There are many such stories, and they make a good point. But there is also a degree of wishful thinking, nowhere more evident than in this passage – the book was published in 2021, remember…

“Jane didn’t miss a beat. “That’s true. But it’s going to be the twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds who will vote in the right president.” Once again, Jane was prescient. Eleven months later, an increase in young voter turnout would help vote out Donald Trump, who had pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, and elect Joe Biden—and one of the first major acts of his presidency would be to rejoin the Paris Agreement and recommit to building a healthier economy and planet.”

To which one can only say, whoops…. And I’ve checked; the young vote, especially among young men, turned trumpwards and they named the economy and their personal finances as the biggest issue. So much for their ecological concerns. A quotation in the book from Desmond Tutu, “the human race takes two steps forward and one back”, seems more realistic. I could also really do without the sentimentality (far too many mentions of “tears”) and the mystic/spiritual shtick. “Somebody or some unknown power looking after me up there,” Jane said, glancing up. “That sort of thing has happened before.” She seems to have convinced herself that there is no such thing as coincidence – “Was it coincidence that put us next to each other on that plane that neither of us should have been on— and that we had the last two seats? If I had not initiated a conversation that opportunity would have been lost.” Abrams, moreover, deems not to notice that her statement, “But I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in free choice,” is in flat contradiction to her evident belief in some mysterious guiding power. Nor does he ever ask why this unknown power is not “looking after” others in the same way. He does reflect, “As I thought about these stories, I realized we had left the realm of science”, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

I’ve no doubt many readers would mind the spirituality, the sometimes fuzzy logic and the tears less than I do. I’ve no quarrel with the book’s message, but I think there are better ways to deliver it.

Review of Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, by Alwyn Turner pub. Profile Books 2024

“This book is […] an attempt to take the temperature of the nation as it emerged from a century when it had dominated the world and was beginning – whether it knew it or not – a long process of decline. It draws heavily on popular literature, on the songs of the music hall and on the newspapers.”

The first thing this book really needs is its title explaining, for anyone unaware that the phrase “Little Englander” has radically changed its meaning since it was first coined. These days, it usually means an insular, jingoistic person who thinks his country better than any other. It was often applied to Brexiters. But it originally meant someone who didn’t believe in the ideal of Empire, thought Britain should stay at home and mind its own business, and was more interested in affairs in Europe, its nearest neighbour, than in anything going on in dominions halfway across the world. A political opponent wrote of the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's opposition to the Boer War: "The impression one got of him from the Press in those days was … that he was an unpatriotic Little Englander". In fact, by this definition it would be Remainers who were more akin to Little Englanders.

The phrase “in the Edwardian Era” is also not completely accurate, unsurprisingly, both because the book does not come to a stop with Edward VII’s death in 1910 and because some of the trends that characterised Edwardian society had their roots earlier. “Edwardian”, like the Regency, was a relatively short period that followed a long one and had a slightly decadent air, as of a society sensing change on the way and rather desperately enjoying itself while it still could. Priestley, in The Prince of Pleasure, described the Regency as “gamey”, and the word fits this era well enough too.

Turner, in drawing its picture, has leant heavily on popular entertainment: trends in books, classical music, art and above all the music-hall. This makes a lot of sense, because these tend to reflect the way a society is really thinking rather than how it would like to see itself. In 1901, the readers of Leisure Hour, asked to name the greatest living Englishman, split the vote between Field Marshal “Bobs” Roberts, veteran of countless Victorian and Edwardian wars, and General William Booth, “the teetotal, vegetarian founder of the Salvation Army”. These may have been the people they thought they should admire, but if one goes by the books they read, the music-hall songs they sang, the papers they read and later, the films they watched, the people they really admired and longed to emulate were demagogues with the gift of the gab, like Joe Chamberlain, and entrepreneurs who, by fair or foul means, made a great deal of money, like Horatio Bottomley. Indeed, music-hall songs were generally very scornful of virtuous teetotallers like Booth.

This way of writing history is also good at highlighting trends. There was the habit of comparing anyone successful in his field to “the ultimate self-made man”, Napoleon,  (“Edward Moss, of Moss Empires, was ‘the Napoleon of music halls’; Horatio Bottomley ‘the Napoleon of finance’; Joe Chamberlain ‘the Napoleon of Birmingham’; Alfred Harmsworth ‘the Napoleon of journalism’”). There was a glut of “invasion novels” imagining a foreign takeover, eventually satirised by Wodehouse, who in The Swoop imagines an invasion by nine separate powers: “England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room”. There was the popularity of mutoscopes, better known as What the Butler Saw machines: “The craze spread rapidly around the country. At one end of the business there were the pleasure grounds at Earl’s Court in London, with hundreds of machines; at the other was the gentlemen’s lavatory on Rhyl seafront, where their presence caused much overcrowding, to the annoyance of those wishing to use the conventional facilities”. Turner’s method also shows up class differences; the welcome for the Entente Cordiale among more travelled, cosmopolitan-minded folk not extending to readers of the popular press or music-hall patrons. “We have a firm belief in the immorality of the French people,’ journalist Philip Gibbs pointed out in 1911, adding that it was ‘in the English music-halls where the popular idea is most clearly expressed’. He was thinking of songs such as Billy Williams’s ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ (1909), in which a vicar visits Paris without his wife and is corrupted by its loose morals: ‘With a lady he was pally, quite entente-cordi-ally.’”

This is a serious history with all the proper apparatus of notes, though unforgivably lacking an index, at least in the Kindle version. But its source material lends itself to much incidental humour. Some is unintentional on the part of its originators, like this unfortunate choice of title: ‘One of the great needs of the world today is manliness in its young men,’ pronounced the Cornish writer and Methodist minister the Reverend Silas K. Hocking in a lecture entitled ‘There’s Now’t So Queer as Folk’.  Some derives from characters who were intrinsically witty in themselves, notably Marie Lloyd. Standing on a picket line in support of a stage artists’ strike, Marie advised letting the mediocre singer Belle Elmore through, “Oh, let her go in, she’ll do more for the strike by playing than she will by stopping out”. Belle had worse problems waiting at home if she’d only known; her husband was Dr Crippen.

This strange little coda to the Victorian Age may have been brief, and in some ways lesser, as the evening “monkey parades” by young clothes-obsessed clerks were a pale reflection of the Regency dandies. But it fairly bristled with interesting characters and has some disturbing likenesses to our own day – the taste for demagoguery, the growing xenophobia, the adulation of celebrity and money. This is a good evocation with a lot of fascinating detail.

Review of The Haitian Revolution, by Billy Wellman, pub. Enthralling History, 2024

A word of explanation first. This is one in a series from a publisher called Enthralling History, whose website declares “We believe that learning history should be an enthralling experience”. This seems to mean, among other things, dispensing with the normal academic apparatus like notes and index (though it does have a list of sources). I’m not sure why history books with this perfectly normal paraphernalia can’t be “enthralling” – if one doesn’t want to read those bits, one can surely ignore them? I assume they think even seeing such evidence of academia may put off the casual browser, which is a pity, since it supposes the casual browser to be somewhat thick.

I’m afraid that to me, the absence of notes and index means it’s Not A Proper History Book, Nevertheless, if the aim of the series is to recruit new readers of history, it’s a laudable aim, and having picked this one up on Kindle while trying to find out more about Toussaint L’Ouverture, I thought it worth reviewing. I’d been reading and reviewing a lot of revolutionary history last year and this was one revolution I hadn’t got around to.

And as a first overview of events, it does its job. It soon becomes clear that this revolution shared the problems endemic to most revolutions, viz: people were clear what they wanted to get rid of but much less clear what they wanted to put in its place, different disaffected groups spent as long quarrelling with each other as they did opposing the establishment, who by contrast were completely focused on retaining their privileges, and the kind of men suited to leading and winning a revolution were not inevitably, or even often, the best men to run the country afterwards.

Yet this revolution did, after a fashion, succeed – independence was gained, though at a ruinous price in reparations, slavery was abolished, though the new leaders found that to keep agriculture going they needed to direct labour in a way that was fiercely resented, and a republic was created, though the difference between a king and a president for life with draconian powers was hard to discern. Presumably those who survived the appalling slaughters along the way thought it all worthwhile.

This could indeed make an enthralling story. It didn’t enthrall me, largely because it was all about events and seemed to miss out the people. But history is as much about people as events, and the heroes and villains of this story (generally the same person at different times) seldom came alive for me, because we simply weren’t given enough of their character and background. To give one example. Toussaint, at the beginning of the war, was a freedman in business (indeed, like many freedmen of colour in the island, he owned slaves himself). Quite late on, when discussing the different attitudes of Toussaint and Dessalines to the French (Toussaint basically wanted to reconcile and stay part of France, Dessalines wanted the French out on the first boat, or dead), the author observes, “It can be assumed that this stemmed from Dessalines’ background, which had been very different from Toussaint’s. Unlike Toussaint, Dessalines had still been a slave when the uprising broke out in 1791. Dessalines had been forged in the rebellion”.

This is such an important point that I marvel it was not made earlier; it explains a lot about why Dessalines was so much less forgiving. We are given a competent summary of events; we simply are not given enough information on the background of these and other leaders to grasp why events happened as they did.

Dessalines, like almost every other leader who came to power after the revolution, had himself made president for life, took dictatorial powers, directed labour and tended to respond to criticism by killing the critic. He also massacred his opponents, though to be fair the French had started that. He is unique among the hapless post-revolution leaders in actually having been assassinated and torn apart by an angry crowd; by the end he was about as popular as Saddam or Assad.

Nowadays, however, although “for the outside world, the person most associated with the revolution is Toussaint Louverture, and for good reason, in Haiti it is Jean-Jacques Dessalines”. This surprises Wellman; it doesn’t surprise me. For one thing, even dictators can get enveloped in a rosy glow of nostalgia when things don’t improve after their death. For another, it was in Dessalines’ time, after Toussaint’s death, that independence was actually declared and the name Haiti adopted. It was also in his time, and on his order, that Haiti’s white population was dispossessed and all but eliminated, which to people who had suffered slavery under them was probably an outcome more to their liking than the forgiving coexistence advocated by Toussaint. It is seldom that oppressed people newly come to power are ready to listen to the likes of Tutu and Mandela on that point.

A competent summary of events, then. It did make me want to learn more, but about the people behind those events. I concluded that what would be really enthralling would be a decent biography (with notes and an index) of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Wellman often, and quite credibly, compares Toussaint to Napoleon. Dessalines sounds a lot more like Robespierre, who to me is a more fascinating character.

Review of Embers of the Hands; Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, by Eleanor Barraclough

(Pub: Profile Books 2024; LJ doesn't give enough room for long book titles)

This is a history of the Viking Age with the ordinary humans left in.

This is an attempt to look at what we generally and inaccurately call the Viking Age (because, as she remarks, the ‘Age Roughly from 750–1100 CE During Which Those Primarily of Scandinavian Origins and Heritage Took Part in Raiding, Trading and Settlement Both Within and Beyond Scandinavia’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it) through the eyes and lives of ordinary people rather than warriors, church princes and warlords. This is the angle on history that I like best, and though the viewpoint of the ordinary is harder to come at, given that the quality were generally doing the recording, when one comes across “the ephemera: the scrappy Post-it notes, everyday text messages and crude toilet graffiti of their time”, it can be immensely rewarding. After one of the innumerable fires in the Bryggen district of Bergen, in about 1200, a cache of rune sticks was found in a tavern. One of them read, on one side, “Gyda says you should go home”. On the other side, the recipient has attempted to reply, but being presumably too inebriated, has achieved only some indecipherable scratches.

This is the sort of thing that brings the past close to us and its people alive. So, on the timbers of the famous excavated Gokstad ship, does the tracing of the shape of a foot, complete with toenails, scratched into the wood by some bored oarsman when the ship was still in use. And the drawings on birch bark done by Onfim, a child in the Novgorod settled by the Swedish trader Vikings who became known as the Rus.

Rune literacy, in fact, was pretty widespread among these people and luckily for us they had a habit of marking their property, so that a wooden walking stick from around 1000 bears the marks “Ivar owns this”, while on the bottom of a reliquary (looted, most likely) are roughly scratched the runes “Rannveig owns this casket”. Women were particularly apt to carve their names into spindle-whorls.

Not all evidence is written, of course. One reason we know that children played in the weaving-rooms of Norse households is that “in the remains of a Viking Age weaving room at Bjørkum in western Norway, the imprints of little children’s teeth were found on birch tar, which seems to be the equivalent of chewing gum”. And the decline and fall of the Norse settlement in Greenland, starved out as the climate grew colder, is clear from the finds of butchered hunting dogs, eaten when their owners got desperate. An even grimmer indicator, in the ruins of the collapsed house of Sandnes, is that “no one had come back for the precious wood from the roof timbers.”

This is a proper, if readable, history, with notes, index etc. I have grumbled lately (and will again) about popular historians trying too hard to be chatty with embarrassing results. This author mostly manages to sound conversational without descending into slang, bar the occasional vulgarism like “quickie” which one could do without. She does tend to get sentimental about children, who are generally “little”, and animals, who are frequently “cute”. But she does not constantly bring herself in as a character, as too many similar writers do.

The focus on land-based and agricultural and domestic activities is a useful corrective to some accounts of this period from which you might suppose that men spent their whole time sailing and raiding, while women hardly existed at all. Rune messages have also been found in the churches of Norway, some scratched on pieces of wood as messages to someone else in the church (one, from the stave church of Lom, north of Bergen, looks like a proposal). In a church at Telemark, an entire runic poem scratched into one of the church’s wooden panels might indicate that tedious sermons are not a recent invention. A lot of research must have gone into finding all these marks of real life and to me at least they are more interesting than the doings of kings. One of the most moving vignettes concerns a volcanic cave in Iceland where people had evidently propitiated the fire-giant Surt, leaving many offerings in a stone boat. The last offerings, made about 20-30 years after Iceland’s official conversion to Christianity, included a lead weight in the shape of a Christian cross, a sort of final farewell before the giant was left alone for ever.

Review of Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat, pub. Birlinn 2024

I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Hearkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind.

(Poem found in the unfinished manuscript of Weir of Hermiston, after the death of Robert Louis Stevenson)

John Amyatt’s remark in the 1770 about the incredible flowering of the Enlightenment in Edinburgh is well known. “Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can in a few minutes, take 50 men of genius by the hand.” But the city has the statistics to back up its intellectual boasts: it is truly amazing how many “firsts” it can claim. The first non-ecclesiastical university in Britain. The first teaching hospital. The first hospital (Craiglockhart) set up to treat those suffering from what was then called shell shock. The earliest purpose-built archive in Europe, Register House. The first use of anaesthesia in the process of childbirth. The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Moffat’s readable history gives some background to this flowering, and starts, properly, with the area’s geology. The topography of Edinburgh was shaped in the Ice Ages: “As gravity and rising temperatures drew the Lomond glaciers eastwards, they collided with the hard rock Edinburgh Castle now sits on, and they were forced to divide. Having scoured and buffed the old volcanic pipe down to the bare, sheer cliffs now visible on three flanks, the ice flow scraped out the deep ravines on either side: what became the Grassmarket/Cowgate and Princes Street Gardens and the site of Waverley Station. And crucially for the development and later nature of the city, the glaciers left a long tail in the eastern lee of the Castle Rock, the tail on which David I’s medieval town would be built.”

These cliffs and ravines made it hard for the “precipitous” city to expand outwards in most directions; instead it went upwards, in the form of tenements, resulting in a great number of people, of all classes, crammed into a small space. This had its drawbacks in terms of hygiene, but it also made for a concentrated, collaborative society in which everyone knew everyone else and could easily swap ideas in the city’s clubs and streets.

What also helped was the Scottish passion for education. Wealthy philanthropists routinely founded schools: George Heriot, goldsmith and moneylender, known for his well-filled pockets as Jinglin’ Geordie, founded in 1659 a school for orphans, George Heriot’s Hospital. In the quadrangle (for the school still exists in Lauriston Place), there is a statue of Jinglin’ Geordie, and the Latin motto under it translates as: ‘This statue shows my body, this building shows my soul.’ Remarkably for the time even girls were not forgotten. “In 1694 the Merchant Maiden Hospital opened. The school was the result of the generosity of Mary Erskine, a remarkable woman who made her fortune by setting up a private bank. Like George Heriot, Mary was childless, having lost her three boys and two girls in infancy. Her endowment had a very specific purpose: it was for the maintenance (and education) of the daughters of burgesses in the city of Edinburgh.”

Another, later, Edinburgh girls’ school had the motto “Light and Joy” and a liberal curriculum with no homework. Its name was St Trinnean’s. “When the artist Ronald Searle encountered some of the girls during the Second World War, he drew a picture of genteel chaos. The St Trinian’s films became legendary, and the portrayal of the headmistress by Alastair Sim was a beautifully observed caricature of certain Edinburgh middle-class attitudes. Having been brought up in the city, he knew them well.” And the rest is history, as they say.

The crowded nature of Edinburgh also, of course, facilitated the forming and fast action of mobs, as it did in pre-revolutionary Paris, and “the beast”, as the Edinburgh mob was known by some, inspired considerable fear in the town’s authorities. Occasionally someone would arise who could to a degree lead and control this mob, most notably, around 1750, Joseph Smith, cobbler, who, “when an issue or injustice came to his attention, picked up his drum and walked up and down the High Street banging it loudly. Ten thousand could be at his back in moments, and no power in the city could resist those numbers.” Smith seems to have used his power over the crowd only for good, but that anyone, particularly a working man, could exert such influence must have alarmed the burgesses.

Smith is one of many “characters” who enliven the pages; a serious history need not lack humour, and anecdotes like that of Dr James Simpson and his friends, experimenting with anaesthesia, are welcome; “To find the most effective form of chloroform, they inhaled it. With one sample, they at first felt very cheerful and then all collapsed only to wake the following morning. That was the one, they agreed.”

I can’t think of any important aspect of city life that Moffat does not cover in this history, and only once did I feel inclined to disagree with him. When he says, “Most witches were either strangled or drowned before their limp bodies were tied to the stake, but others, like the women of 1608, were burned alive (‘worryit’ in Scots)”, I think he is mistaken about that word. Whatever happened to these particular women, “wirryit”, in Scots, does mean “strangled”. But this is a lively, thorough and useful history of an extraordinary city from the Ice Age to the present day.

Review of Real Lear: New & Selected Poems by Claire Crowther, pub. Shearsman 2024

       it was as easy to make them laugh
      as to find a vein. (Mine, Then)

If I were looking for a single word to describe Claire Crowther’s work, “edgy” might do. There is a pervasive sense of unease, and nothing that could be called a comfort zone. It is the kind of poetry that keeps you on the alert, reading with your mind fully focused, because at any moment an unexpected line break or double meaning can jolt you out of what you thought was the path you were following:

       If two atoms

       share an electron and bond in one body
      in one compass-
      ion of matter swaying with so much co-
      incidence direct-

       ionless as the atoms (The Physics of Coincidence)

Even a poem that ends upbeat, like “Snow at Christmas”, creates along the way this frisson of danger:

       I’ve thought of snow as a raptor that seizes
       holly,
       ivy, all the evergreens, a dog that bites
       a child
       near the eye.

The other characteristic, for me, that stands out in her poems is their verbal inventiveness. Sometimes this is (almost) purely playful, like the ship’s foghorn that goes “ohhhm, ohhhm” (from Solar Cruise), but most of the time her wordplay is as deadly serious as that of George Herbert, pointing to relationships between not just words but the things they stand for. This verbal dexterity was perhaps never more evident than in the collection A Pair of Three, which chronicled the experience of being married to a person previously widowed and whose former partner is still felt as s presence in the marriage:

       It’s late. No, partner, not too late. Still
           one of us is late:

Her verbal coinages in that collection, like “werhusband”, and her figuring of the relationship in games with the lexis of grammar, were often technically dazzling, but never devoid of feeling. The same technical ability shows in the sureness of her line. “Dive, I did, I dived and did I land”, from “The Needles, Isle of Wight” may look convoluted on the page, but read it aloud and its rhythms are instinctive. The sound-patterns in

       Scrape the ditch that fits Hob’s Moat
      to Hatchford Brook. Look through oak roots (Lost Child)

are so ingrained and unobtrusive, they could be missed on a sight-reading; this is a poet who really repays being read aloud.

Crowther is sometimes seen as a “difficult” poet. Mostly this means no more than that reading her work requires concentration and intelligence. But now and then, it’s a question of trying to read her imagery as she does, and I must confess that I have not yet got my head around the “Lady Lear” poems in the final section, because I’m not sure what the figure of “Lady Lear” is doing or representing, though I am fairly sure she isn’t just a female version of King Lear. Several of the non-Lear poems in this section, like “Is Stepping Out Dying or Being Born?”. “Last Supper” and “A Covert Bird”, seem to revolve around the word “shy”, and I think that might end up being an easier way into them.

The other word that often occurs to me when reading this poet is “ambitious”.  The sheer daring, as well as inventiveness, in the central image of Solar Cruise: a cruise on which poet and physicist are partners and passengers and where the physicist seems to be trying to convert his fellow passengers on the SS Eschatology (a ship of fools? An ark?) to the concept of solar energy. Her willingness to use quite specialised, sometimes arcane, vocabularies: that of physics in Solar Cruise; that of grammar in A Pair of Three. Her way of constantly pushing words, images, meanings beyond where you thought they were going: to the edge, in fact. Often exhilarating, occasionally baffling, never predictable, never dull.

Review of The Hundred Years War Vol 5: Triumph and Illusion, by Jonathan Sumption, pub. Faber 2023

The beginning seemeth a great pleasure, but the way out is very narrow to come honourably out thereof.’ – Edmund Dudley on foreign wars

This fifth volume has been a frustratingly long time coming; having devoured the previous four, I often wished the noble lord would get on with it and spend less time giving Reith Lectures and fulminating about lockdowns. But it arrived at last and completes a monumental achievement in historical writing. Though those of us who had collected the previous four in paperback and have made space on our shelves for the fifth were pardonably irritated to find that it was only available in hardback and Kindle (I bought the latter as I decided I couldn’t wait for the paperback).

As usual, one can’t fault the thoroughness of the research, the objectivity of the analysis or the readability of the clear, unfussy writing style – “But if the King’s illness had been a misfortune, his recovery was a disaster”. I would say that in this volume there are fewer of the odd little anecdotes and character sketches that enlivened the others, but that may well be the nature of the material. These were the end times of a preposterously long war which had left lands ravaged and populations exhausted. Most, even in the English government, wanted nothing more than to put a stop to it. The trouble was that they had painted themselves into a corner with their misplaced reverence for the baseless sovereignty claims of Edward III and the conquests of Henry V (who, had he lived, was looking likely to have realised they were unsustainable in the long run and to have come to an accommodation).  They were, as Sumption puts it, “prisoners of their own claims, condemned by the logic of the past to carry on a war that they knew they could no longer win”. Even after it had been irrevocably lost, they went on playing ostrich: “Henry VI and Edward IV continued to make appointments to ghost offices in a Gascon administration which no longer existed, and grants of land and revenues which they no longer possessed”.

Meanwhile ordinary people in France continued to suffer the horrors that followed a “ville prise” and the depredations of unpaid soldiers on both sides who replaced their missing wages via pillage while their masters turned a blind eye:

“A soldier called Colard de Verly from the Dauphinist garrison of Guise was captured in the city’s territory while trying to carry off some local people for ransom. Colard was imprisoned in the felons’ jail pending his appearance in the city’s criminal court. The Dauphin’s representative demanded (and secured) his release, asserting that this was ‘not a crime but a simple act of war’. ‘In conducting his wars’, this officer explained, ‘the King does not have the means to pay his troops, who therefore have no choice but to burn down buildings and kill or kidnap people.” Their own people, be it noted.

English people, though protected from such effects of war in their own lands, were burdened with crippling taxes to support an increasingly useless venture; indeed one reason the English could never conclusively defeat their opponents was that the English parliament, which had to vote the taxes, had had enough of pouring money down an insatiable drain.

This volume, of course, includes the story of Joan of Arc (who, you may be interested to learn, wasn’t a shepherdess and never used her father’s name of Darc – apparently Lorraine women went by the mother’s name) and many another grim episode. Nevertheless, there are moments of light relief – the peace conference at which even the two mediators were not on speaking terms; the meeting to which the prince-bishop of Liege turned up “wearing plate armour and a straw hat”; phrases like “John the Fearless’s cynical promise of honest government and tax cuts”, at which we cannot but feel that very little has changed. But the lasting impression is of how much suffering was caused to ordinary people and to how little purpose. What lay behind the deed of amicable separation executed by Robin and Jeanne Porcher of Châteaudun in 1422, which declared that they could no longer afford to live together as husband and wife, we cannot know for sure, but in all probability it involved the ruin of trade and harvests and/or the ravages of looting, all direct results of a pointless and unjust war.

Perhaps the last word should rest with Bernard Georges of Bordeaux, a Gascon arrested by the French for supporting English rule in Gascony (many Gascons did, mainly because the English government was further away than the increasingly centralising French one and less able to interfere with their regional interests). “He told his interrogators that he had joined the rebellion because he ‘did not want to be French’, but it was clear that he had no emotional attachment to the English either. When asked why he had not migrated to England like some of his fellow citizens, he replied that he did not want to live in England and would not like the beer.” Clearly a man who preferred localism and minding one’s own business to nationalism of any kind.