Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 20

Review of Fuglicaavie by Jim Mainland, pub. the print floor 2018

Jim Mainland's pamphlet titles are always an interesting indicator of what he is up to. A Package of Measures alluded both to government measures and the various verse forms he was using, while League of Notions , (reviewed here) again associated his political themes with the exuberance and fancy of his language and imagery.

"Fuglicaavie" is an Old Norse portmanteau word meaning, more or less, a blizzard of birds, originally coined by Shetland fishermen to describe the cloud of birds that follows a fishing boat coming in with its catch. The poem with this title is a shape-poem representing the said boat, and the picture – both the boat and the cloud of following birds – is made up of words from the Shetlandic dialect of Norn, the language spoken in the islands until a few centuries ago but now lost as a language, though many words survive in dialect. Anyone who doesn't get the point of shape-poems should have a look at this one and see how moving is the image of the cloud of lost words following the boat home; if there is a way this could have been as powerfully expressed without using a pictorial image, it isn't obvious to me.

 But as one of the quotes used as an epigraph points out, the word caavie can apply to anything, which is why we also have the grim poem "Styrocaavie", about the pernicious microbeads of polystyrene, deceptively resembling snow, with which we are busy polluting "our"  environment:

falling as friendly precipitation

in the beauty of clog and glom and chronic
fallout beside take-away residual hill and shore
headaches falling into the interstices and sleeving
for the central nervous symptoms whose falling

systems take hundreds of years to decompose whose
few known methods of breaking down cannot
be simulated

As can be seen, the language here becomes, in a different way from the words in "Fuglicaavie", itself a caavie, a blizzard of words not necessarily falling in what we may think of as the "right" order. And the randomness, the breakdown of ordered syntax, immeasurably heightens the anguish of the tone. Mainland is a poet living in a remote rural place; it would be a huge mistake to suppose him, on that account, apolitical or unaware of contemporary concerns, particularly environmental ones. Bidisha, chairing this year's Forward Prize panel, said snidely and superficially "A poet is not an old white heterosexual male philanderer talking about what he saw on his walk". Leaving out the "philanderer", this would actually be a fair description of Mr Mainland and his methods, but you see, madam, it rather depends how sharply one observes on one's walk and how one's talent transmutes observation into language.

As readers of his earlier work will know, Mainland often collaborates with musicians and some of his poems do have musical accompaniments which I've heard performed. When I was wondering how on earth the poem "Fuglicaavie" could be performed for an audience, it did strike me as possible, given a projector and soundtrack, so that the words could move across the screen, while several disembodied voices spoke them in random combinations. It would be unconventional, but then it is rare to find a poet to whom both shape and music are so important.

There are more conventionally constructed poems too in this collection – even a long poem in terza rima (""The Water Diviner"). But the measured cadences of "The Carpenter", celebrating Francesco Tuccio, who made the Lampedusa Cross from shipwreck wood in memory of drowned refugees, hold the same anguish and power as the caavie poems:

After the sea of children's cries, and worse,
the flooded, capsizing, submerged silence,
a slow dystopian interrogation
of lost papers and sifted identities

The poet conjures up a possible motivation for so hazardous a journey:

a dream
you once had, where you walked among strangers,
were freely enfolded in their welcome;
a gesture whose simple shape your fingers
now trace and retrace clasp and unclasp:
a tree out-branched, upright on the level plain,
a raised hand to haul you from hostile waters.

This pamphlet is £6 inc, p & p and is probably the best £6 you've ever spent if you are interested in what innovative and aware poetry can do, whatever the age, ethnicity and inclination of whoever writes it.  The author is doing the distribution: he can be contacted at Rockville, Nibon, Hamar, Shetland, ZE2 9RQ. Or if you're lucky enough to live near Lerwick, you can find it in the Shetland Times bookshop.

Review of “Cygnet” by Season Butler, pub. Dialogue Books (Little, Brown) 2018

"Another few feet of the cliff are gone. The end of the yard is a booby-trap, something out of a cartoon. There's nothing underneath to support your weight, just a drop into the constant traffic of the waves against the rocks. Fresh rock and soil and dangling roots like the nerves of an extracted tooth are exposed along the C-shape of the cliff face. One of the trees, a dogwood, clings to the cliff-side at a desperate angle, four-petalled blossoms shivering in the constant sea breeze. It looks like it's still falling. I can't see the other one at all. My dogwood tree at the bottom of the sea."

This alarmingly unstable residence is on the island of Swan, located in the archipelago of the Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire. There is in fact such an island, but this is very much a fictitious version of it. In the book, (set in the present, 2015) the island has become a sort of gated community for the old, that doesn't, due to its location, actually need gates. Our narrator The Kid, a 17-year-old girl, has in effect been dumped there on her grandmother by her feckless drug-addled parents, who promised to return for her but failed to do so. The grandmother has since died and the girl, who has needed to be resourceful in her short life, is hanging on in the house, tolerated by some of the regular inhabitants (the Wrinklies) but resented by others, and supporting herself in an interesting way, by digitally altering all the photos and cine film that comprise the lifelong memories of her elderly neighbour, Mrs Tyburn, to better reflect the way that lady wishes her life had been – overweight children are miraculously slimmed, and the boat named after a husband's mistress rechristened, by the magic of a little technical know-how that remains a mystery to the Wrinklies.

The Kid, in fact, has been messed about by inadequate adults all her life and is now living on sufferance in a community set up to cater to the needs of oldies but gradually and literally crumbling away into the ocean, arguably as a result of that generation's actions in the past. The nearby island of Duck is plagued by sudden methane explosions, the result of having been used for years as a dump for, among other rubbish, disposable nappies. There is a certain grim humour here, and also in The Kid's narrative voice, which is one of the best things about the novel. Blake Morrison's quote on the back, saying he hadn't been so captivated by a first-person voice since Holden Caulfield, nearly put me off, for even as a teenager I found Holden a tiresome brat. The Kid is a great deal more engaging. It does strike me that for a girl who has not been much in school and, we are told, hasn't read much, her vocabulary is a bit too extensive and sometimes verging on the literary. But she is very listenable.

There are a fair few typos in my proof copy, which I've been asked to ignore since they'll hopefully be edited out. I will mention one, because I'm tired of seeing published works, whose authors and editors should know better, spell the verb "retch", meaning to vomit, as if it were the noun "wretch", meaning a literary person who can't spell…

The voice puzzled me at times by having, I thought, a tinge of UK English, which seemed strange in a book so firmly set in the US, Sure enough, the writer turns out to be one of those deracinated exiles I so often find the most interesting, because they see their own country clearer from a distance (rather like RLS describing Edinburgh from Samoa). This probably explains the sharpness of the topographical descriptions of Swan Island. All in all, this is one of the better novels I've read this year, original and engaging with a saving touch of humour.

Review of Jubilate Messi, by Steve Ely, pub. Shearsman Chapbooks 2018

Here's a challenge. You have a short pamphlet of poems (there are 12 or 15, depending on whether you count a sequence as one poem or four) whose subject matter is football. Can you interest and engage a reader who admittedly likes poetry, but whose knowledge of football stops at a one-time adolescent crush on George Best and a liking for the film The Damned United?

The answer, much of the time, is yes. Of course, one reason is that subject matter is not the only thing, nor even the main thing, that poems are about. Here, football becomes emblematic of male solidarity, class conflict, a semi-condoned vent for energy and violence. In the first poem, "Tohuwabohu", it is more, the ball becomes the mythological egg laid by Night, from which the world hatches. This might sound OTT, and indeed there is a humour in the exalted language that would be hard to miss. But for all that, the comparison between egg and ball, and other round objects (suns, worlds, testicles) is not entirely frivolous. The mediaeval and post-mediaeval games involving whole towns, few rules and a lot of casual violence are represented here by the game at Bartholomew Fair, which was in August, but most of these games were held in winter, often around Christmas and New Year, when it is tempting to see the ball as a stand-in for the absent sun.

As one might expect from Ely, the matter of class conflict becomes central, and several poems concern the chasm between amateur and professional. The concept of amateurism in sport is often romanticised; here it is forcefully pointed out that "ludere causa ludendi" is a motto relevant only to people with money. The Carthusians and Corinthians, playing the game "for game's delight" are in a different world from the Northern slaters and riveters for whom football could be a rare escape route from poverty, provided they could get paid for doing so, and even non-football fans will at this point find themselves siding against the Carthusians with their "hands of white kid" and with Fergus Suter:

riveting plate till the shipyard hooter
blares and the working day relents
and limps to his cockroach tenement
where even a dram can't ease the pain;
play up Corinth, play the game.

It is interesting to note that the "Scottish game", the subject of the pamphlet's central sequence, differed from the English public-school game not only in being keener on paid professionals but in being more collaborative, as befitted its working-class roots. The English game had favoured individuals holding on to the ball and dribbling it as long as possible; the "Scottish game" introduced the passing play which characterises present-day football. There's something quite satisfying about that.

The final poem, "Jubilate Messi", is a praise-poem addressed to Lionel Messi and in a conscious echo of the style of Smart's "Jubilate Agno". This is a style that quite suits it, since it is Ely in his most allusive mode, jumping from association to association without stopping for explanations in much the same way Smart's unpredictable mind tended to. I wouldn't know Messi if I met him in the street and have certainly never seen him play. But I can recall the joy that radiated from Best's talent as he left the opposition behind, and it is much the same delight that comes through here:

I will rejoice in Lionel Andrés Messi, for he leaps before the Lord like David and his joy is uncovered: Let the rain streak bright on the flaring floodlights, Empire’s phosphorescent rainbow arching like a cat.

So… I can’t altogether share what seems to be Ely’s tolerance, if no more, of violence on the field (apologies if I’m misreading the tone, but in his “Ballad of Jack Ross”, the line “he tripped and hacked and chopped” sounds more celebratory than anything else). And yes, some background knowledge of football would probably make it more immediately accessible. But guess what: when first reading, I clean forgot Mr Ely’s helpful habit of putting notes at the back – I was too caught up in the momentum and exuberance of the poems. The notes are worth reading, they will give you a lot of interesting facts, but when I did read them I saw that the essentials had already come through to me. That says a lot for the craft.

New book next year

I'll be publishing a new collection with Seren in about April/May 2019. It's called Afternoons Go Nowhere and here's the title poem:

Afternoons Go Nowhere

Butter hardens in the dish overnight:
the tourist office keeps winter hours.

The year's last cruise ship has left the harbour
and the voices of Italy, New York, Japan,

are heard no more in the street. Afternoons
go nowhere. Dark falls early, finds folk

up ladders, spades in earth, work
unfinished. Radiators cough into life:

plumbers and sweeps can't find time enough
to get round, clear out the debris.

Somehow no one is ever quite ready
for this, as if they half hoped

time too would let things slide, be up
some ladder finishing what started late.

Review of Brief Lives by Christopher Meredith, pub. Seren 2018

The six short stories in this collection range in time from the 1940s to the present and beyond, and are arranged in chronological order. I even thought, when I first read through, that I could detect gradual language change in them, but it isn't that, it is rather a very keen and natural eye for period detail, so that one really feels one is in the postwar Valleys world with its Woodbines. cockroaches and the novelty of babies being born in hospital ("Progress"), or, later, in "The Cavalry", the same milieu in the changing times of the sixties, with TV and consumer goods just beginning to infiltrate a world where men could still recall war service and council estates were aspirational places to live:

They came to the end of the council houses and to the start of the terrace. The last estate house had the gable end of the terrace instead of one of its front garden walls. She'd known it before the estate was built but it was hard to remember. The terrace of Stanley Street used to point up the hill to nothing but some old mountain and a coal tip, some old farm. Yet it wasn't all that long ago. […]

It was still unchristmassy here. Mark looked at the front room windows as they passed. It must be funny to have no front garden.

Mark, a small boy, is one of the two point-of-view characters in this story (if any wiseacre ever tells you two POVs won't work in the same story, point him at this one) and as he has done before, Meredith proves adept at seeing through a child's eyes in a completely matter-of-fact and uncontrived way:

Christmas didn' happen outside the house, like you thought it would. It was grey and grainy and unmoving and nobody was about. it was like the day went on being itself, as if it didn' care what it was supposed to be like.

It may seem odd, when looking for a theme in a collection of stories, to start in the middle, but in this case it feels appropriate. It seems to me that the preoccupation common to all of them is human contact, and this comes over most clearly in the two middle stories. In "The Cavalry", a woman who works as a home help goes out of her way, on Christmas morning, to make contact with a lonely old man, and teaches her children to do the same. Later she is dissatisfied with her efforts and feels she should have done more, resolving to go and see him again very soon – "she'd heard of Home Helps finding people. She didn't want to leave it too long".

In the next story, "The Enthusiast", set in the present, a man is accidentally reconnected via email with a childhood friend, Paul, whom he has not seen or thought about for many years. This sets off a train of memories connected with his childhood and young adulthood. The email correspondence continues but they live far enough apart for the protagonist not to think about actually arranging a meeting – though the way he over-analyses the content of Paul's emails and his own replies suggests he would like to. Then something happens which not only renders this impossible but also forces him to comprehensively re-interpret the emails he has been reading.

It would be easy, but inaccurate, to conclude from the juxtaposition of these two stories that the reason communication partly succeeds in one and fails in the other is the difference between face to face contact and email. But this is misleading. The first story, "Averted Vision", takes place during World War 2; there is plenty of face to face contact and a catastrophic failure of human communication. In the second, "Progress", set in 1950, a man in what sounds like a happy marriage is nevertheless unable to communicate to his wife his understandable reasons for taking an important decision and resorts to a lie. And in "Haptivox", set in the future, a couple seems to achieve quite an enjoyable form of communication via virtual reality. Even here, though, the couple's dream of complete union is shown to be ultimately impossible:

It seemed to her that they were like two huge buildings, or cities, with their complications of floors and passageways, stairwells and liftshafts, the lacework of girders and fills of brick and concrete and then the surges of electricity and of fluids, the traffic and commerce of every day. Imagine all that thinning and becoming porous, and then these two universes interpenetrating, the stairwells from different buildings intertwining and joining, the skeletal architectures permeating one another and interlocking. The mechanical inhabitings of sex, the crude transformations on the beach were nothing to this, where the different-same energies whispered in the different-same channels. And he felt this too. All the space that matter is made of suddenly understood itself, and was generous, and let the other in. Their different grammars and lexicons didn't just blend into a creole. They atomized as they crossed and reconfigured. And once this had happened there could be no images, nothing to observe, only this new building, with nothing outside its own self-awareness and an apprehension of the marvellous.

And immediately some part of this new place started to fail. Images started to return of lights going out and pipework cooling, a sense of some shrivelled, hard thing disconnecting itself back into being.

Individuality reasserts itself; it may be that we are all ultimately "unreachable" like the old man in "The Cavalry" or "the imperfect likeness of a quick, intelligent face, glimpsed, so to speak across a gulf" ("The Enthusiast"). But the human impulse is to attempt to bridge that gulf and it is such attempts that these stories chronicle.

Poems and "current issues"

Poetry is often accused of not addressing contemporary issues, public issues. This is a lazy accusation, generally made by people like columnists seeking for an easy headline, who either don't read much poetry or who don't get the role of nuance in poetry, expecting it to spell out The Ishoos in capital letters for the benefit of the obtuse (a group for whom it simply cannot cater and should not try to).

When I recently reviewed Frank Dullaghan's latest collection, Lifting the Latch, one poem in particular stood out for me as addressing a current issue in a way that only a poet, as opposed to a journalist or polemicist, could really hope to do. Frank has kindly agreed to my blogging about it and quoting it in full in the process, so I am.

The first thing to note is the narrative voice. It would have been very easy to choose an "I" voice and enlist sympathy for an individual. But this poem is in the "we" voice, assuming the identity of the countless multitudes who flee, and have always fled, one place for another. And while it empathises with their plight:

We walk with our lives
on our backs, our children,
drunk from walking, by the hand,
our pasts blown up behind us

this sense of multitudes also, quite deliberately, carries a hint of alarm, not from any ill-will on the part of the speakers but because their arrival heralds massive change to a way of life:

We move through your culture,
your story telling, your politics.
[…]
We will move through your memories,

your imagination, your knowledge
of yourselves.

It is the fear of such change that leads so many to be hostile and unwelcoming in the face of this influx. The poem does not deny its reality. But the narrative voice, through its emotionless patience, its inexorable repetition of "we move" and "we walk", not only echoes the trudging feet; it points up the inevitability of what is happening and the utter uselessness of trying to turn the tide, rather than live with it. The mention of the earth's rotation reminds us of how long it has been the case, ever since we came out of Africa, that we have been moving south to north, east to west – another advantage poetry can have in addressing "current issues" is by going beyond the "current". And although the poem never explicitly says so (see above, because it's a poem, not a polemic), its end points to the fact that this movement is not just political. If climate change does what most scientists think it must (and given the kind of noddies on the "denial" side, one is driven to think it certainly will), then what now looks like a flood will seem a trickle and those who now have borders, villages, countryside they can call their own will have to realise their own place in the world is not as secure as they thought. A powerful poem.

There is Nowhere Left
by Frank Dullaghan

We move through your borders,
your villages, your countryside.
We walk with our lives
on our backs, our children,
drunk from walking, by the hand,
our pasts blown up behind us.

We move through your language,
your donated food, your fields
of tents. We walk without hope,
as if this is our new reason for being –
this great walk, this achievement
of pushing the miles behind us.

We move through your culture,
your story telling, your politics.
We walk against the turn
of the earth - East to West, our
great numbers slowing its rotation.
We will move through your memories,

your imagination, your knowledge
of yourselves. Our footsteps
will dog the rhythm of your days.
We will walk across your clean
bed linen, your tablecloths, your
conversations. There is no stopping

now that we have started. There is
no use erecting barriers, arguments,
prayers, for you too are moving,
you too are losing your place.

Review of Nutcase by Tony Williams, pub. Salt 2017

This is the story of a contemporary young man who goes to the bad in Sheffield, but there is a twist; he is an avatar of the Icelandic saga hero Grettir Asmundsson. The blurb calls the book a "retelling" of Grettir's Saga, but that may be slightly misleading. Aidan's story is not a simple reprise of Grettir's; for one thing, Aidan's life is punctuated and to some extent defined by a seemingly endless series of young women who are even more messed up with drink and drugs than he is, whereas women play very little part in Grettir's life (or if they do, the sagaman does not think fit to dwell on it). And his end is less like Grettir's than that of the mercifully almost-forgotten thug Raoul Mouat. Aidan is, however, very like Grettir in the way his initially quite good intentions are brought to nothing by the need to live up to the hard-man image he has, fairly accidentally, acquired and which dogs him thereafter, partly because people expect him to live up to it and misinterpret his words and actions accordingly, partly because he himself feels a need to live up to it.

In some ways, the saga's major influence on the novel is not on its characters but on its narrative method. Any saga fan will be aware of the huge cast of characters who wander in and out of a saga, so much so that the sagaman sometimes takes pity on the reader by announcing, after a character has somehow left the scene, "and now he is out of the story". This situation is replicated in the way Aidan and his friends wander from casual job to job, from relationship to relationship and from one accommodating friend's sofa or floor to another. They are transients; the people and places in their lives mostly temporary. In one short two and a half-page chapter I counted the names of 17 different people, few of whom I could recall or who would necessarily recur. Some readers might find that frustrating, but it mirrors the kind of lifestyle the novel is creating and if the reader has trouble remembering which name fits which character, Aidan almost certainly does too. You have to read it like a saga, trusting that if a particular name is going to matter, it will recur.

Aidan himself, of course, does have to come over as a character and he has to develop, from an unruly but not ill-natured child into someone who can kill. It helps too if he can retain a little sympathy from readers who are bound to get impatient with his shiftlessness and contrariness. This he manages by dint of a certain dry humour and the occasional emergence of better feelings that never quite go away, but mainly because there does seem to be a terrible inevitability about his life: if something he does can go wrong, or be disastrously misinterpreted, it surely will. In this he is very like Grettir the "ogaefumadr", the man of ill-luck.

The novel's narrative voice is a blend of the laconic saga-style and a more sardonic, modern idiom that works well:

everyone said it was Shelley who was the evil one and Mark was just going along with it because he was shagging her or a bit thick or scared of her, and probably all three. But Shelley had done Sociology A-level and said that was misogyny plain and simple and when a man was hard everyone wanted to be his friend, but if a fit young woman was they said she was a sicko. Which was all very well but years later when it was in the national press about stabbing that horse and how she had kept an Armenian slave in the cellar of a house on Spital Hill, everyone including the Home Office psychologist concluded that she was a sicko after all.

If there's one element of the saga that I miss in the novel, it is the supernatural. Glam, the terrifying ghost whom Grettir overcomes at the cost of his mental health, is, it is true, on one level what Grettir has it in him to be; he seems to Grettir as Grettir does to others and Grettir fears the darkness inside as well as outside him. This can be replicated in human terms by Aidan's fear of becoming like the child abuser who is Glam's equivalent here. But Glam is also elemental: Grettir has to fight not only other men and himself but the forces of nature and another world, and that is a dimension that for me the novel doesn't have. The odd thing is that one can see how it might; Aidan and his brother already have Irish Catholic names, why not give them the background and tortured conscience to go with it?

One of the most remarkable things about the novel is that it never loses momentum. This isn't easy when one is essentially describing the lives of a bunch of druggie layabouts; it's a milieu that can soon become a deadly bore. That it does not is both a tribute to the author's handling of pace and a vindication of his choice of style; the saga-form really does suit the material.

Review of Lifting the Latch by Frank Dullaghan, pub. Cinnamon 2018

Frank Dullaghan's new collection is carefully shaped and structured. It has five named sections, and though there is a lot of thematic crossover between them, each does have a distinct character: "Small Town Brewery Blues" concerns the poet's past in Ireland, "The Children Are Silent" focuses on contemporary politics, with "Aisling" we are in the territory of dream and myth, "Lazarus Leaving" is very conscious of approaching age and death, while the final section, "Beannacht" ("blessing") is focused on family and the personal.

Dullaghan's work background in business and his long-term residence in Dubai are unusual in British poetry and have given him some fascinating subject matter. I've mentioned in previous reviews that he is one of very few poets to have actually written about the financial crash of 2008 and its effect on individuals. Although it isn't a major theme of this collection, its ripples are still felt, especially in the long meditation "Love Poem for Oreo", in which the narrator, his certainties and future plans overset by the crash ("how will I provide now/for our old age?") is temporarily too stalled to move on:

The past
will not let the future enter.

But he finds that the adaptability of the neighbour's cat he is temporarily minding in what, to both, is an unfamiliar environment helps him to change his perspective:

There is still a way
of living in the world.

The quiet, dry humour with which the poem concludes, when the cat has gone home

It would never have worked out anyway –
the language barrier, the age difference, religion,
species, politics

is very typical of Dullaghan's writing voice, in which, though the "I" voice is prominent, self-absorption and self-pity are emphatically not. The political poems in the second section are some of his most powerful yet, I think, and the more so for curbing and controlling their feelings. In "Doll" he imagines a child playing in Gaza.

She wraps a bandage
around the doll's eyes
so it cannot see, covers its ears
to grant it passage to a new world
of silence. Then she pulls of
both of its legs, yanking them
from their plastic sockets, discovering
how cleanly it happens, the lack
of blood.

What he is very good at is making the connections and comparisons between his own life and the lives of people in the wider world (one reason, I think, that he chooses to juxtapose sections I and 2). In the poem "Things I Don't Know" he marries political concern with technical skill in a corona-like form, using the last word of each verse to lead on to the next and, in each, contrasting small inconveniences with matters of life and death:

I know about boats. But not like that,
not recklessly, not as small heavy bobbings overladen
in the crash of a soul-sick sea,
not that deadly form of travel.

I know about travel – motorways, traffic-jams,
airport security checks. But I know nothing about
the pregnant belly of a truck, nothing
about gasping for delivery, for foreign air.

Again, a lot of the impact of this comes from his ability to retain enough emotional detachment to shape and control his utterance. This is true even in the poems dealing with age and death. Indeed the wry tone often returns, as in "The Voices of the Dead", which begins "I sit with a coffee and my dead brother". This supernatural encounter does not produce any cosmic answers to life, the universe and everything:

We expect the dead to be wise but they are
only themselves. What did you expect, he says.

You don't think of me that often any more. True.
Life does that. It fills you up with its noise,
leaves little space in your head for the voices of the dead.

Indeed, in "Love Poem for Oreo" the poet reflects that "this is not a time for answers". What you get in this collection, underpinned by considerable technical skill, are questions that need thinking about, juxtapositions that throw new light on each other and, very often, phrases so exact that they linger in the mind – "some moments can last longer than others" ("Remembering Your Green Dress").

Review of "Mr Willett's Summertime" by Martin Malone, pub Poetry Salzburg 2018

This is a themed pamphlet, of 25 poems about and around the Great War. It opens with what might be construed as a disclaimer and a warning, a poem called "Séance" which implies that at this distance, "occluded by one century/and the paradigms of myth", professional historical methods have little more chance of getting at the truth of those times than does the tawdry sham that is a séance.

And of course it is true that nobody could expect 25 poems to provide a comprehensive overview of five years of global carnage, nor is that the aim. The poems are more like torches, pointed into odd and sometimes unexpected corners to highlight whatever was going on there at the time. It isn't always life at the front. The title poem commemorates the inventor of daylight saving, William Willett, whose early-morning rides inspired him to bring the "morning, incandescent with summer" to those still asleep behind their curtains. The irony of this happening in 1916, when the extra daylight was spent in extra work and worry, and the even greater irony that Willett had died of influenza the year before:

1916, and, like many a medal, your monument arrives
post-mortem, the blinds still drawn in Petts Wood

is as much part of the times as events in the trenches. So is "Mrs Mounter", the landlady immovable in her doorway who has seen so many young men come and go.

The torches do seem to shine on artistic individuals more often than not – the artist Christopher Nevinson, poets of several nationalities, Saki, Helen Thomas, widow of Edward. I think my favourite of these was "Let Us Sleep Now", an imagined encounter in which Owen has the "strange meeting" with his one-time enemy not in hell but on a Vienna tram, and finds him "clean and good-looking and well again" – albeit headed towards the cemetery at the end of the line. And there is an unforgettable blackly humorous moment in "Phoebus Apollo", about the aristocratic Julian Grenfell adjusting to life at the front:

As with all sport, you took to it well, bagged a laurel;
found increase in battle, love in the taking of life
and gilded your game book with three Pomeranians.

That brief moment when the reader thinks: even an English aristo wouldn't shoot small fluffy lapdogs, before realising that these are the Pomeranians who live in Pomerania, is surely deliberate, and very effective.

But for my money the poems in the voices of the less famous bring the physicality of the war most vividly to life. In "The Turnip Winter" it is easy to identify with the German mother's feelings of inadequacy at not being able to provide for her children, while in "Trench Requisites" we have one of the pamphlet's most successful voices, that of a sardonic and embittered veteran whose attitude to new arrivals at the front is one of pardonable impatience and brutal honesty.

Yes, how we hate you, you cheerful young men
with your tinned kippers and today's Daily Mail;
the periscope from Harrods, the warm new boots.

It will be noted from the above that we are still in officer country here, and in fact other ranks make relatively few appearances except, interestingly enough, in the poems influenced by French and German poets and in one poem about the Russian women's battalion. Non-English views of this war don't seem to gravitate so inexorably toward the experiences of the officer class. However it was one of the poems translated from German (from an original by Heinrich Lersch) which had, I thought, the only genuinely weak ending in the pamphlet. I don't know the original, so can't tell if Lersch alone is to blame for "at home, a mother dries her tears", but it didn't work for me.

A lot of research has clearly gone into these poems, and despite the disclaimer in the first poem it seems to me that the result is to shine a genuinely convincing and vivid light on those aspects of the time that he has chosen.

Peaks, troughs and organic wholes

This was a Facebook post from a couple of years back; I re-read it and decided it really belonged on the blog.

Just a personal thought. A poem, to my mind, is or should be an organic whole. That being so, it doesn't actually exist on the lyric heights for the whole of its length; it has peaks and troughs. Every line does not coruscate at you, jumping up and down shouting "notice me!" There are quiet, unremarkable lines, which swell up like waves under the surface of the sea until they foam over into something brilliant. These are lines which can easily be rubbished by a careless reviewer, who will point out the "boring" or "predictable" language, but in fact they are paving the way for what comes next. Try for yourself quoting brilliant, memorable single lines from a poem. Do they work outside their context? Would you not often feel impelled to quote the few lines before, to show where they emerged from, what they convey: why, in short, they are so brilliant and memorable?

Now there's a type of poem much written and admired, in fact often known informally as a "competition poem", which does try to make every line a peak. It isn't an organic whole; it is a series of flashy, notice-me lines which don't obviously grow from the poem. I don't care for these poems, finding them shouty and ultimately unmemorable because they are trying too hard to be unforgettable. But there's another thing, connected with the fact that these lines don't seem to grow naturally from the poem. They don't seem to come from anywhere, and paradoxically when a line doesn't come from anywhere, it COULD actually come from anywhere, including where it shouldn't. In fact, when marking student work, this kind of poem rings alarm bells. There might be all sorts of reasons for derivative work, but I'll put forward the notion that thinking in terms of fine phrases, knockout lines, moments rather than whole poems, might be one of them.