Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 27

Review of The Facebook of the Dead by Valerie Laws, pub. Red Squirrel Press 2014

As a glance at the acknowledgements makes clear, many of these poems were written as commissions, for residencies or projects, or in response to requests for poems on particular subjects; indeed the acks page includes a section of poems "published online, as part of activist and/or literary projects". Poems with a practical purpose, then, and the order of adjectives in "activist and/or literary" might suggest that "activist" is the more important to the writer.

So I started by picking out poems that hadn't been written for any of these reasons, on the assumption that these would tell me the most about the poet's own voice and preoccupations. In "Hitting the Road with Frida Kahlo", she conflates her own road accident with that of Kahlo. I must admit, it's a title that would normally make me groan, because Frida flaming Kahlo is, like bees, Alzheimers and childhood memories, a subject that crops up far too often in contemporary poems and is beginning to be an automatic turn-off. But this is an original, individual treatment that for once establishes a genuine, intrinsic connection between author and subject and justifies its use. It's also very vividly done:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I clamber out, broken bones grating,
Scrunching like brown sugar, fall down
To lie on the icy road, beginning my new life

The title poem updates the elegy form with wit and sharpness to the online age: it can't be an accident that the ending

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp and if I could,
I'd unfriend Death for you, report him for abuse, the troll
Who poked you, who is "following" us all, block him for good

is so painfully reminiscent of Chaucer's three young drunks setting out with their proud boast "we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth".

I really didn't need this poem's footnote on "Rip", nor the ones to "Mrs Bennet's Burden" and "Scent for a Suffragette". On the other hand I couldn't half have done with explanatory notes to "Baking Scones for Eminem" and "God is a DJ" (haven't quite got around to googling Marshall, Slim and Armin van Buuren yet). I suppose what this shows is the problem with footnotes: our readers have different areas of knowledge and ignorance and these are, more and more, generationally determined. One good reason, I think, to put them all together at the back, where readers can ignore or consult them as they wish.

The section "Poems of Pathology, Anatomy and Dealing with Death" contains some of my favourites in the collection: perhaps the subject matter sorts well with her other incarnation as a crime writer. "Keepers", juxtaposing the voices of two technicians from the nineteenth and 21st centuries whose job is to create mementos of the dead for the living, is artful and compelling (here the note was again useful for generational reasons, since I knew exactly what the Victorian mortuary photographer was up to but had never heard of a "doll re-borner"). The two poems of "Deathbed Writing Workshop", which could easily have been sentimental, are instead powerful (and the word "debridement" on which they centre is wonderful, a gift to a writer).

I'm not entirely so keen on some of the activist poems, because they strike me as too tailored to the cause. "The Sex Life of Slugs", written for an online "against rape" project, explains too much of the faintly comic process the slugs are up to, and its final lines

Meanwhile, after dark, slugs stroll
The pavements, heedless of rape

left me thinking: well yes, but they do get trodden on and salted rather a lot, so on the whole I'd still sooner be a female human. The few purely humorous poems aren't really my cup of tea either, though to be fair, "Phone Sex" sounds as if it's meant to have a tune attached, while "Lowering the Teaune" might do more for me if I had ever listened to "The Archers" (I sometimes seem to be the only person in the country who hasn't).

Mostly, though, this is a varied and entertaining collection. The medical poems, especially, are effective - it is no surprise that she has often been successful in the Hippocrates Awards.

Review of The Portable Veblen, by Elizabeth McKenzie, pub. Fourth Estate 2016

"I'm super excited about this getting married idea, But there's a lot about me you don't know."
"There'd better be," he said warmly.
"So it makes sense for the tips of icebergs to fall in love, without knowing anything about the bottom parts?"

This notion of people as icebergs, most of which are beneath the surface, is central to the novel. We come in at the point where Veblen, a typist and translator in her thirties, has just become engaged to Paul, a move she suspects may have been an error. Both she and he have huge issues with their families: indeed every parent in the book is more or less hopeless at the job. Several of them, as we gradually discover, have themselves been poorly parented and are passing their consequent hang-ups on to the next generation: in this respect the novel is reminiscent of Samuel Butler's The Way of the World, though, as we shall see, it fights shy of his pessimistic conclusion.

Partly because of her sense of humour, McKenzie is excellent at writing about relationships without cloying sentiment or tiresome psychobabble. Her observation is acute and detailed:

…yet it was clear that your choice of mate would shape the rest of your life in ways you couldn't begin to know. One by one, things he didn't like would be jettisoned. First squirrels, then turkey meatballs, then corn, then - what next? Marriage could be a continuing exercise in disappearances.

Later, this same acute observation creates an almost unbearably moving scene when Paul, a medical researcher, is trying to get it through to the relatives of brain-damaged patients that the trial these patients are about to take part in, though it will improve knowledge of their condition, will not actually do anything to cure it. They have all been told this; they just don't want to believe it.

The people in the room began to talk, trading what they'd heard. As the volume rose, Paul shrank, his stomach bunched into a knot.
"People," he said. "This is how it is. People!"
Two young women with pale skin and knitted brows were whispering to each other, and one raised her hand.
"Our dad's here and we've read the papers," she said. "And we know that this trial is to test a device to be used within hours of brain injury. It's not designed to help people who have already suffered TBI, such as our dad and other members of this trial. Isn't that true?"
Paul said, "That was well put. Did everybody hear that?"
The room fell quiet, mown down. […]
A woman in a heavy, rust-coloured parka patched with duct tape raised her hand.
"We read the papers too. We understand all that. But for us it's better to try something than nothing. It's possible my husband could get some benefit out of this procedure, isn't it?"
More murmurs from the others. He heard someone say, "We thought so too."
He was bulging with anger at their wilful ignorance, stretching himself to hide it. He said, "I hope you'll all take the time to read the prospectus again and understand that in this trial we do not expect-" The faces, from every side of the room, were tense, wrung out. "We don't expect-" He felt the room closing in on him, every face trained on his. […] He couldn't breathe.
"We don't know what to expect until we've tried it," he blurted out suddenly, and the room lightened many degrees.

McKenzie also has a very good ear for dialogue, particularly between Veblen and her sharply drawn mother, for whom daughter's place is in the wrong. In fact the book is sharp, well-written, often funny and generally enjoyable, and if the pace sometimes slows a bit too much early on, it certainly picks up by the end. But I do have one reservation. It seems almost every new American novel I have read in the past few years is determined to achieve a happy ending, even if events up to that point make nothing seem less probable. This was the problem I had with Bradley Somer's Fishbowl . To be fair, this is not as extreme a case; it is clear, for instance, that if Veblen and her mother have achieved a modus vivendi, it largely depends on their being separated by the Atlantic. But other long-standing relationship issues are still sorted out and tied up in over-neat and fairly incredible bows. I don't know if this is because the American market demands upbeat endings, but this one didn't seem to me to have evolved naturally from the book.

The Year of 21 Reviews and Three Interviews

So at the start of the year I resolved to write two book reviews a month - with one caveat, I also do author interviews, which take more work, so I decided they would also count as review posts. That would mean 24 posts over the year.

Well, I made it. I did three posts in November, two reviews plus an interview, so the one December review makes up the 24. They can all be found by hitting the tags "book reviews" and "interviews with writers" in the sidebar on the left.

For those who like statistics, the 21 books reviewed included 3 anthologies, all poetry, and 18 single-authored books. Of these, 8 were prose and 10 poetry, while 11 were by women and 7 by men. Nearly all were contemporary or near-contemporary. I included a review of the short stories of Ismat Chughtai because I'd never come across her before and thought others might not have done. Elizabeth Melville isn't contemporary either, but the selection of her work by Jamie Reid Baxter was reasonably so, and I'd been hugely impressed by it at Stanza. Of the three author interviews, two were with women (Barbara Marsh and Catherine Fisher) and one with a man (Steve Ely).

Most of the authors aren't the mega-famous type, since they get lots of reviews anyway. I did review a Louise Glück, because the reviews I'd seen didn't, to my mind, quite get to grips with one aspect of it. There was no non-fiction, which is unusual for me. But the stress on poetry was deliberate: I began doing this because writers, particularly poets are always complaining that there isn't enough of a reviewing culture and it seemed reasonable to try to actually do something about it rather than just whinge. Since I chose most of the books, it figures that the reviews are mostly positive, though I hope still critically aware. If I don't like something about a book, I'll say so. I shall keep on reviewing next year, though I won't set targets, but will still hope to do one or two a month.

Review of Second Wind: new poems by Douglas Dunn, Vicki Feaver and Diana Hendry, pub. The Saltire So

This is a short anthology of poems, commissioned from the three poets, on the theme of ageing. I bought it both because I'd read and enjoyed the work of all three before and because it's a theme becoming somewhat relevant and fascinating to me. Indeed in the last two months I have read two individual collections, by Philip Gross and Tamar Yoseloff, centring on this very theme. Each poet's work in this collection is prefaced by a short note on how they worked, which is interesting though it left me slightly puzzled. Vicki Feaver says "The poems were written in solitude. But meeting with Douglas Dunn and Diana Hendry and sharing poems and ideas gave me the encouragement I thrive on". Diana Hendry, on the other hand, speaks of "meeting, talking about and workshopping poems", which suggests rather more collaboration. Her note also mentions that the topic they were given was, specifically, "Creative Ageing", and the editorial note indicates that the brief was to "challenge the orthodoxies surrounding ageing".

I can imagine why the commission may have harped on the positive, because one obvious pitfall of this theme is that it may produce something quite morbid and depressing. But pitfalls in poetry almost always come in pairs, and while avoiding this particular Charybdis, it is possible to veer into a Scylla of relentless chirpiness. I think this is why the Dunn poems, of which I'd been expecting the most, having long loved his work, partly disappointed me. The first poem, "Thursday", is just plain not very good. Lines like

If only I could tap my old exuberance,
High spirits that I plied in days of yore;
Then maybe I would find a kind deliverance
From the curse of being such a bloody bore

may be meant as amusing (I didn't find them so, but we old grouches are hard to amuse). But it sounds just like Clive James versifying, and Dunn is so much better than that. The next couple of poems are better, but keep coming up with slick one-liners like "one chirrup absent from the dawn chorus" and "So fall off a barstool swigging your hemlock" ("The Wash") that begin to sound like a desperate determination to make a joke of everything. In his prefatory note, he mentions that he re-read that unbearably poignant scene on ageing from Henry IV Part 2: "we have heard the chimes at midnight", but found no inspiration there. I suppose it wasn't jaunty enough.

Luckily the very next poem, "Wondrous Strange", shows Dunn back at his best, not trying to come up with easy answers to what is by nature elusive:

Now it can almost be heard. But not quite
Almost. Still on the far side of nearly,
It is the melody of a floating feather.

There are some memorable poems after this, notably "Curmudgeon", with a genuinely funny and observant one-liner, "he is a virtuoso concert pessimist", that leaves the rest standing, and "The Glove Compartment", which doesn't try to mitigate loss and mortality with flippancy and is starkly moving.

Most of the Dunn poems are set in the now of ageing; Vicki Feaver, quite often, comes at the theme through memory, looking back to a youth that has departed. She is

travelling forwards at time's pace
and backwards and forwards
at the mind's speeds ("Travelling").

There are several luminous remembered moments –pomegranate juice, dressing-up boxes – and a tendency to reinterpret, revalue in the light of age what is seen and experienced, like her reaction to the ageing, drying fruit in "Clementines". I think it's arguable that there are, in modern poetry, not just in this collection, too many "I remember" poems and that it's a theme which can become predictable, but it is very well done here. The most memorable poem, to me, was "The Blue Wave", in which she comes closest of the three to the "creative ageing" brief in celebrating a painter:

But in my head there's a painting
done in your nineties
when just to lift your arm

was an effort: a single brave
upwards sweep with a wide
distemper brush so loaded

with paint the canvas filled
with the glistening blue wall
of a wave before it falls.

One of those images that does in a moment the work of a paragraph.

Diana Hendry's selection is mighty unpredictable. We go from memories-of-childhood poems to coming-to-terms-with-the-present poems and (my favourites), ones which veer unexpectedly off at right-angles to reality, like that iconic oldie Cpl Jones going into the realms of fantasy. She takes risks, which means that not all of them will come off – I don't think "Meditation on an Old Bear" really rises above doggerel, and in "An Alternative Retirement" I find her praise of the Hatton Garden jewel thieves, or as she calls them "the glamorous gang riding off with the loot", plain annoying: a thug on a pension is still a thug, not a role model.

But other risks come off rather beautifully. "Autobiography" with its ballad rhythm has an air of Causley

And what d'you remember of fear, child?

Long grass, bare feet, imagined snakes.
Dark slid a lid across the day.

And "Beyond" is probably my favourite poem in the collection. Its syntax and lineation are freed-up, unconventional in a way no other poem in an otherwise completely conventionally-justified book is, and the thought-line is to match.

What is it about the need for it? The why
of flight &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp mountaineering &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp the gift of grace. &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp How dire

if ours was the only galaxy!

How happily the word sits in the mouth, satisfying
as a communion wafer.

This is the sound of the distant train
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp running through your dream--

be-yond be-yond be-yond be-yond.

I found this an uneven anthology, but its best poems, notably "Beyond", "The Blue Wave" and "The Glove Compartment" make it well worth the modest £7 cover price.

Review of A Formula for Night by Tamar Yoseloff, Seren 2015

With a Selected, it's fun to go back to early poems and see when various themes and techniques emerged. I hadn't read the poems from Sweetheart for some time, and had forgotten how reminiscence-based they were: like many first collections, they take much inspiration from parents, childhood memories, early love affairs. But already individual traits are emerging. The memories don't all come from one place: America, London, Scotland all figure. There's a keen interest in the mortality of things, the insides of animals and people, the way places change over time. In "Fleet" we see both this and another preoccupation that will become central: this is essentially an urban poet who is more moved and vitalised by cityscapes than rural scenes:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I glide blissfully through my day,
all liquid, like a fish. I can't understand
what gives this extra lift to my step, as if I'm floating,
and the cars drifting through Clerkenwell Green
are barges carrying sailors home from sea.

But an undercurrent sinks me at Islington:
I sense the bones of the old prison, the plague-dead
dumped straight from their beds

There's also a hint, in "The Arnolfini Marriage", of the fascination with ekphrastic poetry and coming at a theme through different media, which would develop into sequences like "The City With Horns", centring on Jackson Pollock, and into her publishing venture Hercules Editions, which has brought out pamphlets by various poets in which words and images work together.

In later collections it becomes ever more evident that this is a displaced poet, one raised in one place (though even then a traveller), but now living elsewhere (and still travelling). I have a fondness for displaced poets, because their way of seeing places seems to me to be unlike any other. Their eye takes nothing for granted; nothing is overlooked for long acquaintance or accepted as commonplace. The delight and surprise pulsing through "The Nolans in Japan", where Tokyo is "a wind-up toy - flashing,/bright" is that of someone seeing it new, but in London too, where she has lived a long time, she is conscious not just of

the alleys wet with condensation
darkened streets

but also of

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp the rivers running
just below the ground, the Wandle, the Walbrook

the Tyburn, the Fleet. (Christmas in London)

The other thing about these poets' way of seeing, especially seeing the past, is that a place is not just a place, but that place at a particular moment of time. In "The Atlantic at Asbury Park" a derelict fairground's heyday is briefly evoked and becomes emblematic for that time when everything still seems possible to adolescents, though the evidence of the adults around them suggests otherwise; in "London Particular", the speaker's London merges with the city her father knew decades before.

This consciousness of time passing is always liable to foster a sense of darkness. In many of the London poems, her fascination with ruined buildings comes through; "Construction" is in fact more concerned with what has been demolished:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The empty plot forgets
clothes strewn on vanished floors, spoons and frying pans;
in demolition the goal is ground,
we are out in the open.

The later poems in particular are getting quite death-haunted, as tends to happen when poets get older. This city-dweller is not usually much for flower poems; it seems grimly appropriate that when she does choose to write about one, it is either poisonous ("Sinister Little Flower") or the invasive, destructive "Knotweed":

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp You will not budge

now you've found your calling: the felling
of our failing structures.

In the fine sequence "Fetch", where a woman indulges her fantasies of a different and more dangerous life, Yoseloff's taste for the sinister creates real, gripping tension and fear in the reader. This undercurrent of menace and decay exists in many of her poems, but so, alongside it, does the related carpe diem impulse of "City Winter", another hymn of displacement. Another thing I like about displaced poets is that they have no comfort zone; they are never entirely where they want to be and if there are any answers, they are always somewhere else:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp What you want

you won't find here. A train
leaves the city, its complicated tracks
weave past buildings still to be built,
girders lifting beyond the horizon,
its passengers bound for those lit rooms
flickering like grubby stars
on the outskirts.

This may make for restlessness in the poet, but it stimulates nothing so much as excitement and variety for the reader.

Potemkin Anthologies

I've been thinking an awful lot about poetry anthologies lately, mainly because I've been reading an awful lot about poetry anthologies - I've heard, over the past year and especially the past few months, of umpteen coming out (even been invited to be in some). I thought at first it might be to do with the imminence of Christmas, since they make popular gifts, but I think it's more than that. The poet Jon Stone suggested on a Facebook thread that publishers found them more saleable than, for example, first collections by relative unknowns, and I think there's some truth in that, though I also think the very existence of Facebook is part of it - suddenly it has become a whole lot easier for an editor thinking of putting an anthology together to contact a large number of poets at once.

Anthologies of writing, prose as well as poetry, have always been an easy way in, a way to find writers you might not have known about and get a taste of their work so that you can then go on to read individual collections by those who please or interest you. In this respect they're very useful. Some, especially those on specific themes, have more permanent uses. They can show poets reacting differently over time to the same theme, like John Greening's "Accompanied Voices" about poetic reactions to musicians. Or they can show the reactions of different sectors of society - classes, genders - to the same event, like Tim Kendall's "Poetry of the First World War". Some showcase particular schools, which is handy for those who think in terms of schools, though to my mind the most interesting poets will never fit into one. An increasing number are "instant reaction" anthologies, got up in a hurry to promote some cause or protest at some wrong. These are by no means always poor: it depends on the editor's judgment and on how thoroughly, or hastily, the job is done, and "For Rhino in a Shrinking World", to take one example, is excellent. But I have read some I admired a lot less.

Ones that are purely time-based - Poetry of the Forties, Best of 2015 sort of titles - are, to my mind, only useful in the first sense, i.e. they give you a taste of many poets, allowing you then to choose the ones into whom you want to go more deeply. These anthologies are, if you like, the baby stage of reading poetry and I don't mean that as an insult, we all have to go through it. What worries me a little about the current plethora of anthologies is that I wonder if many readers are not getting beyond it at all, never delving deeper into one poet. I think this matters because, despite the critics' constant admonition that a poem should be able to "stand alone", one can actually often get a lot more out of seeing it in the context of a writer's other work. Motifs emerge and develop, as they do in music, becoming more haunting each time you encounter them. In a sense, when I read Louise Glück's latest, I am also re-reading The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, Averno and all the rest (and who wouldn't want to?). Poetry is genuinely more rewarding when one has more than a passing acquaintance with someone's work as a whole.

My other worry is in case more and more anthologies should lead to fewer and fewer first collections. Publishers only have a certain number of slots per year. I foresee many new poets who are well known in magazines and anthologies but who cannot for the life of them get a whole collection published. I don't actually want to read an anthology, note poets I should like to know more of, and then find there is no way of doing so, nothing behind the tempting facades, as if I'd stopped off in a promising tourist spot and found it a Potemkin village.

Interview with Catherine Fisher

Catherine Fisher, who lives in Newport, writes both poems and YA fantasy novels. In poetry, she has won the Cardiff International Poetry Prize, while with her novels she has been shortlisted for many awards including the Smarties Books Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Children's Fiction. Her futuristic novel Incarceron was published to widespread praise in 2007, winning the Mythopoeic Society of America's Children's Fiction Award and selected by The Times as its Children's Book of the Year.

SHEENAGH: I think you've said before that you, like me, are one of those who can't write poetry and prose at the same time because the rhythms are so different; the poems just come out prosy. Do you consciously think yourself into a poetry or prose mood? When something starts to germinate in your mind, how soon do you know which form it's going to take? And what would you do if, say, you're in the middle of a novel and you suddenly get a really good impetus for something that just has to be a poem?

CATHERINE: It's hard to write both at once; sometimes it works. I don't really do anything consciously with writing- it's all just spur of the moment. If a line comes to mind which is quite obviously a line of verse- or even an image or idea, I try to jot it down and keep it to work on. Whether a vaguer idea will turn out prose or poetry sort of depends on the size of the thing- having written many novels I know now when it's going to be a big story, with lots of complications, rather than a more stripped-down subject for a poem or a series of poems.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp If I'm in the middle of a novel and I get an idea for a poem I usually just do it, or at least make notes about it. A novel takes about a year to write so if you wait you'll have lost it... which happens sometimes.

SHEENAGH: Your poetry is basically aimed at adults while your novels have been marketed to children and young adults. Granted, the divide between YA and "adult" books is a bit artificial, I read your YA fantasy novels with pleasure and I'm sure an intelligent child would like your poems, But have you ever been tempted to write "adult" novels, or poems specifically aimed at children?

CATHERINE: I think I just write the books for me now- I don't really think about the YA or adult thing, and as you say, the adult readership for YA is huge. The only thing that makes the books YA really is that the protagonists tend to be young people- having said that, most of the other characters are adults and they are just as important. In the current set, The Chronoptika books, Jake and Sarah are the nominal heroes, but then there's Venn, Wharton, David, Maskelyne, a whole host of adults who are almost equally important.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Having said that, publishers have rather different ideas and don't like too many adult characters. They seem to feel that teens only like to read about other teens, which I think is untrue. After all, this is the time in life when the adult world is impinging, and teens want to learn about it. When I was that age there were no YA books really, so I went from Enid Blyton etc straight to Sherlock Holmes and plenty of sf. And that was good.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So if I wrote an adult book it wouldn't be that different. Though of course there is the bitter truth that so called adult fiction is taken more seriously by critics and pays better. But also it is true that the YA market seems to be prospering, even in these tough times.

SHEENAGH: "I think I just write the books for me now- I don't really think about the YA or adult thing" - That's always been my impression; your books certainly never talk down to young readers. But I know that some of your UK titles have been altered in US editions, because US publishers haven't trusted their readers to understand the British titles (though why Crown of Acorns became Circle of Stones still baffles me; have US children really never seen acorns?) Have you ever encountered any other sort of intervention like this? I'm thinking not only of how you always credit readers with the brains to know or look up what's new to them, but also of times when you've tackled emotionally difficult material - killed off parents, allowed siblings to admit to serious resentment of each other, or allowed your young 18th and 19th-century girl protagonists to be at fairly explicit risk from men, though luckily they're pretty good at taking care of themselves. Has a publisher or editor ever tried to get you to simplify or tone anything down?

CATHERINE: The Crown of Acorns title change baffled me too. Circle of Stones is so bland! I don't really understand some of these changes. The funniest one was the change of The Oracle, a title which was considered too baffling for US kids and finally became The Oracle Prophecies. Of course. So much simpler.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp There are other interventions but they are fairly low-level- mostly questioning word usage, usually because a word can be unfamiliar or idiomatic or mean something else there. I don't think I've ever been asked to tone down content, or had complaints about what goes on in the books- at least not from publishers. Some US librarians have lists which rate you for content.. how much swearing, how much violence etc.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp But I think my books are fairly innocuous compared to the more realistic YA book. At least fantasy distances violence and danger. The stuff that happens in your own street is probably far more frightening, in real terms.

SHEENAGH: "As for poetry, I hope anyone can read it. " - we both know they can't, though. Or at least, they tell themselves they can't. Many adults, certainly, seem to have a mental block as soon as they see what someone described to me as "those little short lines" and to assume it won't be for them. I would hope that doesn't apply so much to children, but I haven't your experience with them. Do you see any way to overcome this reaction of fear, antipathy, whatever one calls it? Particularly if, as I suspect, it isn't natural to children but develops as they grow older.

CATHERINE: I don't think young children have learned an antipathy to poetry. On the contrary they love it, but for them it is an oral art, like singing or stories. Joining in, chanting along, having fun with words.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I think maybe children learn to fear poetry because somehow they pick up this idea that it is 'difficult', not straightforward, that it doesn't tell a story and hides its meaning in metaphors. So it becomes a puzzle to be solved.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Having said that, of course poetry is difficult, because it's dense, compacted, packed tight. It's taken neat. Or, in another image which I'm playing with at the moment, a poem is like one of those pellets that owls regurgitate. You have to break it open and pick out all the bones and fur to find out what the poet has been digesting.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Good teachers can make it loved, but many teachers find it difficult too, I suspect.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I think the only way to keep that fresh response of the young is to read the stuff aloud, which transforms it. As a kid I chanted reams of poetry to myself because I loved the sounds, the rhythms, the rhyme. As well as the sharp, brilliant visual flashes you get.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Teaching is hard and in these days there is little room for fun. But the child who 'gets' poetry will never lose their hunger for it..

SHEENAGH: Like many YA writers, you are deeply rooted in mythology: Welsh, Egyptian, Norse, among others. And this often goes hand in hand with the futuristic element: ancient archetypes and themes play out in a new guise for a new age. I've noticed that your dystopian futures, as in the Chronoptika books, tend to be materialistic, practical, cleansed of myth, which fortunately reasserts itself like Nature resisting the pitchfork. Again, is that conscious or just the way you naturally see the world? And do you think it would actually happen? (I'm recalling Terry Nation saying gloomily that he couldn't imagine a future that wasn't basically dystopian.)

CATHERINE: Myth is fascinating and eternal. One reason I enjoy it and use it a lot is that these are well tried and tested stories; there is something in them that goes deep, however often they are re-interpreted. And they do go well with the futuristic.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I have done a few dystopias and yes they tend to be materialistic places, and the reason for that, I suppose is that it's my worst nightmare- places where stories and the past have been obliterated. But the stories always come back. In Incarceron, for example, the prisoners have a whole secret mythology of a prisoner called Sapphique, who once escaped, and will one day return. The really fun part for me is creating this backstory and playing with mythic tropes, writing whole sections of scripture and poetry about him or by him, while keeping the reader wondering if in fact he ever really existed.

SHEENAGH: Following on from that, one mythology I haven't particularly noticed surfacing in your work is Irish, and I know you have Irish ancestry. Any plans in that direction?

CATHERINE: Ah. I love the Irish stuff. It has a peculiar, raw savage feel. It's different to the Welsh stories which are softer - the myths of Cuchulain etc seem primal and unrefined. To start using them would be a challenge- and somehow dangerous, as if I would be handling powerful, unstable dynamite..
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So I have no plans just yet in fiction, but certain poems may happen, as a way into it.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I don't think humanity will ever lose stories. At the moment we seem to have more of them than ever, and everything is always being reworked. Sometimes I don't like the results, but I like the obsessive need for it.

SHEENAGH: Your little poem pamphlet Folklore (Smith/Doorstop Books 2003) was very much about that, how folk motifs survive by being reworked in each generation. When you say "sometimes I don't like the results", are you thinking of anything in particular?

CATHERINE: Well, I'm being purist here. I love the idea that stories are being constantly reworked. But that means writers can- and do- take liberties with the characters and re-arrange them in new scenarios and different adventures. Which is fine, as long as there is some integrity with the originals. I suppose I'm thinking mostly of TV and film adaptions- things like the recent Jason, and Merlin, which I don't tend to watch because the modern idiom and 21st century responses of the characters irritate me. But then it's always been like that. I bet there was some crusty old scribe back in the 1100s complaining that Chretien de Troyes' new version of the grail story totally wrecked the original, and that things didn't really happen like that.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The great thing about myths is there is no original and there is no really.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp This impinges a bit on fan fiction, but of course with that there is an original.

SHEENAGH: Talking of which, I know you've encouraged children in the past to write fan fiction based on your books, particularly when they wanted the story to continue and you wanted to go off and write something else! Did you ever read any of it, and if so, how did you react? I know there was a fair bit, and I'm guessing a lot of it revolved round Getting People Together who didn't explicitly come together in the books - young readers don't half want true love to triumph, whatever else happens...

CATHERINE: I gather there is quite a bit of fan fiction around, especially about the worlds of Incarceron and Sapphique but I have never gone looking for it and haven't read much. I have no objection to people writing it as long as it's clear it has nothing to do with me. As you say, I imagine it's mostly people playing with the characters' relationships and re-arranging them to their own liking, or inventing new adventures for them. I understand the desire to do that, if you are so in love with that world or those characters that you just want more and more of them, and the author is too busy (or disinclined) to provide it. Also it can be a way into writing, as copying paintings is for artists.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp But I think in the long run it leads to sterility, and writers have to be brave and take the step away and invent their own stories.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp By the way, earlier I said that with fan fiction there is an original, and that's true, in that say, the book of Incarceron exists. But looking at it in more detail, even that book is actually an assemblage, an artwork created out of thousands of bits of things- paintings, poems, books I've read, films, places I know, and many more tinier, intangible things. Only the way it's put together and expressed is truly mine.
So maybe, even with fiction, there is no ultimate original.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Which doesn't stop me feeling possessive about the work and uneasy about what happens to it out there..

SHEENAGH: Talking of originals, both your poems and your novels sometimes use historical characters, but very differently. When, in your poems, you get into a past voice, like James Hartshill in The Unexplored Ocean, or the two adversaries in "Incident at Conwy", it seems you're trying to get as close as possible to the reality of being them. But with the historical characters in your novels, like John Dee, Maskelyne, John Wood of Bath, it seems the first thing you do is work free of the reality, changing names and at least lightly fictionalising the character. Why might that be?

CATHERINE: Actually these two examples are quite similar. James Hartshill, for instance, is invented. I wanted to write a set of poems about Cook's voyages and initially tried to use Cook's voice, but that method was full of potential pitfalls. His diaries exist, he was a real person. So I could easily be seen to get things wrong, be inaccurate, and would be constrained by his responses and the things he really did. It was easier to comment on Cook through Hartshill, who can be or say anything I want him to be. He starts off as very young and naive and grows disillusioned.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So that is very similar to the way I use Jonathon Forest as a fictionalised version of John Wood. Wood was a wonderful man and full of crazy theories, but the demands of fiction meant that his life had to be re-arranged into the pattern I needed. So Forrest is Wood, but not quite.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp For example, Wood actually met a young woman called Sylvia and took her into his household, but she later committed suicide. In my story Crown of Acorns she does not do that.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp It's as if one is writing an alternative form of what happened, or trying to impose pattern, because real lives are so chaotic and random. I think that this is the need underlying most fiction.

SHEENAGH: Many of your YA protagonists, especially the girls, are quite spiky, combative characters. Is that a reaction against the sort of "heroines" you and I mostly had to put up with in the books of our childhood?

CATHERINE: Oh well, we've all cringed at the stereotypes. It is a reaction against them, but in fact I think YA readers- who tend to be mostly girls- now simply expect them. In my teen reading I had no trouble being the boy hero in my mind, but now readers don't have to do that. Things have changed, and that's good...

SHEENAGH: For some reason I've never quite figured out, I found the tree buried upside down in Darkhenge hugely sinister and unsettling! Where did you get the idea for that?

CATHERINE: It is immensely sinister, which is why I love it. It comes from Sea Henge, the neolithic timber circle found on a beach in Norfolk, I think, and which was the subject of a huge row between neopagans and archaeologists. In the centre of the circle was what turned out to be the remains of an upturned tree-trunk. Enigmatic. Unexplained. Just there.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp There is just something so intriguing about that. Such a sense of lost stories and rituals.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Hence the book's themes of the Unworld, and the shamanic ladder into other dimensions. Incidentally if you are ever in the Fwrrwm in Caerleon they have a modern sculpture there of an upturned tree which is truly tremendous, and maybe a bit like how the original might have looked.

SHEENAGH: A huge row between neopagans and archaeologists sounds such a wonderful scenario, I want to read the book about it! I know you've been very involved with archaeology; its influence is obvious in many of your books. Is there anything else from that arena that you're thinking of writing about? (I bet we could show you some inspirational stuff in Shetland if you ever come up so far!)

CATHERINE: In Darkhenge I did try to convey both sides of that argument- whether to leave the remains in situ and let the sea destroy them, or take up the timbers and preserve them, even though it's the place they surround that's important. By the way, Seahenge by Francis Pryor is probably the book.)
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I love archaeology and especially the Neolithic, which has such fascinating mysteries. What we lack, of course are the stories those people told. And without them we will never understand them, however familiar we become with their material circumstances.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Imagine trying to understand Christianity without knowing the story of Christ, or Norse myth without Odin, Thor and co...You'd have a vague idea, that's all. Not even any names.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I'm not planning anything from that far back in the past at the moment though, as my next book is a contemporary one. But that's all top secret yet

SHEENAGH: We'll be waiting with interest…


Catherine's website is here

Poems

The White Ship

The white ship sails all night out of his dreams,
her fierce figurehead drinking the cold sea.
He leans and fingers her smooth, open lips.

Spindles of ice her frosted spars,
sails crumpling, sloughing and filling
with the salt breathing of the wind.

All day he sits, talks, works, and he forgets her,
till in a window or in someone's words
comes sea-glitter, a gull's rebuke,

and in the turning of his head he's back
among creaks and whispers, the rotating wheel
that no-one grasps, the cabin with its lamp

swinging on the outspread charts.
It's those charts he never can remember;
always as he gropes for them they've gone,

leaving a sense of infinite distance;
islands marked with strange calligraphy;
and names, names he almost knows,

that tantalise but just won't come,
so that in songs or a poem's skirl
he tries their echoes over on his tongue.

Each night he journeys on the winter ship,
hands on the ropes, feeling the spray,
living in the cracks between his days.

And where he's sailing to he doesn't know,,
except that it's too late to turn back now;
that here are all the spaces of his art,

the craft he once thought he was master of,
driving him out across an endless sea,
alone under the stars; far from home.

(From Altered States, Seren 1999

Incident at Conwy

During the Wars of the Roses a Lancastrian officer was shot by a marksman stationed on the battlements of Conwy Castle. The river between them was at least half a mile wide. The feat was recorded by several chroniclers.

1. Llewelyn of Nannau

Oh man, you are foolish to wear that surcoat.
the gold and the blue outrage the dull afternoon.
You are a heraldic flicker among the leaves
tempting my pride.
I have not killed men in the stench and fury
of battle only, that I would baulk at this.
I am an archer. I send death winging,
sudden and cold over parapet and fosse;
the lightning that strikes nowhere twice.
I'm too far away to see your pain,
the blood that will sully that bright coat;
too far for the shriek from your lady's arbour.
Nor will imagination spoil my aim.
The taut string creaks against my fingers,
brushes my cheek softly, as I draw back.
My eye is steady down the shaven shaft.
You're a roebuck, a proud stag, a target.
Your words do not goad me, I can't hear what you say.
Your death will be skilfully given, and without rancour.
At least I am not too far from you for that.

2. Rhys ap Gruffudd Coch

The river is wide, and the leaves cover us.
we are safe enough, but they are certainly ready
- each tower and arrowslit is crowded with faces,
and notice the fool on the battlements with his bow.
This castle will drink an oblation of blood
before we break its stone teeth.

That archer has seen me; he lifts his bow.
Well the river will not bleed from his arrow.
Doubtless he would kill me if he could
and boast about it over the spilled wine;
a distant, stout, nameless man
who would never have seen my face.

Then he would thresh about in the straw at night,
seek solace from priests, drink away memory,
but the line would have been thrown between us,
the bright gift passed, that he could not take back.
Look, he draws. If he should strike me down
I will never be so far from him again.

More poems here

And here's an extract from Catherine's ongoing Chronoptika Quartet. This is from the first book in the quartet, The Obsidian Mirror. Gideon is a human boy who was stolen years ago by Summer, the queen of the Shee who live in the wood where "all times are now", and he longs to escape.

The Shee knelt and touched the footprints, sniffed them. Then it raised its hands to its ears. "What is that terrible whining cry?"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Gideon was wondering that too. "Is it the world freezing up?"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp He had been with them so long, they had taught him to hear as they did. He could hear the cold night coming down, puddles on the gravelled track hardening infinitely slowly, the icy crystals lengthening and creaking to a pitted surface. He could hear the birds edging on their frozen roosts, the blown barbs of their feathers, the blinks of their beady black eyes. He could hear the frost crisp over the windowpanes of Wintercombe.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp But this whine was worse than all of that.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Sounds like a human machine," The Shee rose, disgusted.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Gideon nodded. The creatures' aversion to metal still pleased him, even after all this time. It was their one weakness. The Shee listened, snow dusting its thin shoulders, its moonpale hair glimmering.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Summer will want us to investigate." Gideon turned.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The Shee's eyes went sly. "Enter the Dwelling? Many have tried. Venn is too careful."
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "For you, he is. But I might be able to…"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Summer forbids it."
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp It was a risk. They were treacherous beings – this one would betray him in an instant. So he said heavily, "You're right. And after all, tonight there's the Feast."
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The creature grinned, as he had known it would. "The Midwinter Feast! I'd forgotten. We must get back."
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Its quicksilver mind would be full instantly of the promise of the music, the terrible, tormenting, fascinating music of the Shee. The music that devoured lives and time and his own humanity, the music that enslaved him and haunted him and that he hungered for like a drug.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "You go," he said. "I'll come later."
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I have to bring you. She'll be furious." Its bird-eyes flickered. He saw the small pointed teeth behind its smile.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I'll follow you. I just want to see where these prints go."
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp It hesitated, tormented. Then nodded. "Very well. But be quick!" It turned, and its patchwork of clothes ebbed colour, a magical camouflage, so that now it wore a suit of ermine and white velvet, the buttons on its coat silver crystals of ice. it stepped sideways, and was gone.

Review of Love Songs of Carbon by Philip Gross, pub. Bloodaxe 2015

Eustache Deschamps, in a 15th-century ballade, noted forensically the effect old age was having on his body and mind: not just his yellowing teeth and failing tastebuds but his impatience with youth and intolerance of change, and observed gloomily "Ce sont les signes de la mort".

Love Songs of Carbon is a whole collection on the theme of ageing; if it does not echo Deschamps' mordant gloom, that is because Gross, now in his sixties, has a writing voice rather like that of the late Edwin Morgan, dominated by intellectual curiosity and irrepressible playfulness, and therefore sounding far younger than his physical age. What terrifies and disgusts Deschamps intrigues Gross; you can sense him not recoiling from his subject matter, but wanting to poke into the whys and wherefores of it, as in "Mould Music", where it is not too much to say that he delights in the insidious beauty of decay:

the ghostly blue-grey

of the lustre on the plum skin
is developing its imprint

of the after-life.

As for playfulness, nothing ages a person faster than forgetting how to play, and in this respect Gross has always been careful in his work to avoid the trap of "growing up" or "acting his age". There is no word or idea with which he will not play, and here this principle extends from not-so-casual verbal games like substituting "drink about it" for "think about it" (in "A Briefer History of Time"), through the thought-provoking pun in "Theses Written on Mud":

That Thesis and Antithesis were a marriage made in Heaven, or in Hegel. Ask their only child, Syn

to the disturbing notion he plays with in "Mattins", that centuries of valuing the soul over the body might be mistaken; that the "rusty", stiff body shuffling toward the bathroom at three in the morning might be more cherished by its creator than by its owner. This poem about an ageing body positively (and ironically) glitters with the verbal subtleties of an agile mind, witness the multitude of meanings he gets into the single word "passing", and the wordplay in the body's moving "through the cloisters of itself/to its offices", where "offices" hints beyond "set times of prayer" to "house of office".

The word "play", in fact, dominates the collection; there are even poems called "Players" and "Ways to Play". "Towards a General Theory of String" is the pure play of a theorist, ricocheting between science and metaphor, and indeed Gross's intellectual curiosity extends into fields where many poets don't go. There is vocabulary, every so often, that will send most non-scientists to a reference book to learn something new – I'd had no idea, before this, that Brownian motion was a genuine scientific term, not just something Douglas Adams invented in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Of course, all this playfulness has a darker side; with such a theme it would be odd if it did not. "Senex" (not a reference to Betjeman's poem of that name; they are as unlike as they could be) is as forensic in its observation of ageing as Deschamps:

crisp, tetchy, liable to flare
- no time for smoulder, […]

bones honeycombed, half air,
lightness that could blow away

(and will)

And behind ageing is mortality: in the innocently-titled "A Walk Across A Field", a couple unsure of their footing on frozen grass are uncomfortably aware of how this is "like any pavement/for the very old". Back at their car, the narrator observes, in a phrase reminiscent of the Falklands war reporter's "I counted them all out and I counted them all back",

I count us in
- me, you.

This poem, and others like "A Love Song of Carbon", revolve around awareness that all human relationships and activities end the same way. Yet the collection's tone remains positive, insisting on seeing it as "a kind of victory […] To be/here. So very here. So very small" ("Storm Surge"). And the opening poem, "Paul Klee: the late style" ends with an exhortation:

be

the drum skin
beating till it rips

still beating (don't say beaten) even then.

Again this is a mite reminiscent of the defiant ending of Edwin Morgan's late collection, Cathures. He, however, was then in his eighties and consciously saying farewell. Philip Gross, happily, is but a lad in his early sixties and his 'satiable curtiosity should be delighting us for a long time yet.

So what should we be doing?

It's been a problem ever since social networking online was invented. Writers, and still more, publishers, thought it was a heaven-sent way to advertise one's wares, and most publishers will urge their writers to use it to that end. Unfortunately there is a fine line between making people aware of what you do and making a total pest of yourself, and on networks like Facebook and Twitter (especially the former), people cross it every day. How Not To Promote One's Writing is dead easy: not only are there guides to it all over the internet, but we can see daily examples that, to anyone with an ounce of tact or style, beggar belief. Don't post reviews of your work on other people's timelines. Don't, when wishing them happy birthday, suggest in the next breath that they buy your book. Don't ask someone to add you as a friend and at once ask if they'd like to review your book. Don't add them, without asking, to groups that concern your work. Don't "invite" them online to events hundreds of miles from where they live, just because they're on your friends list. We could all go on....

But what would actually be more use is some guidance on what we can do by way of self-promotion, that will have the effect of making people want to know more, rather than less, about our work.

So here's my suggested method.

Facebook and Twitter are both good for making announcements. "I'm reading at Y on date Z". "Hey, I got into magazine X!"."My book got a good review at this link." All fine, as long as you say it once, not every day for a week, and as long as you also post about other stuff, preferably not all writing-related.

If you can, though, make even these posts not all about you, so that people other than you, your best friend and your doting mamma have an incentive to read them. It's a matter of phrasing. Try "Delighted to be reading at Y on date Z with those fine poets A and B" (tagged if you can). And "Folks might like to try magazine X; I just got a friendly reply from them" (if you can add "a timely reply", your friends will be not only interested but amazed). The third one properly goes "Many thanks to CD for his generous review at [link]". There's a degree of normal politeness in this, but it also works for you, in that it widens the circle of interest (A, B and CD will all also have their fans).

Have a writing blog, and post non-ephemeral stuff about writing on there first, linking from Facebook and Twitter. But make the blog about writing, not just your writing. Talk about general questions, ways of working, current debates in writing. Review other people's books and mention their successes. If you must think in terms of "what's in it for me", well, there's always the chance that if you review Jack's book, he may return the favour. But that isn't really the payback. What you are aiming for is to make your blog interesting to writers and readers in general, so that when you do choose to post about your own work, you will have an audience predisposed to listen.

And even posts about your own work can be given a more general application. Most writers are fascinated by others' ways of working, so post about your methods. A poem or an extract from a novel will have some audience, but a post about "why I chose to write this in the second person" or "the problems I had with the sestina form and why I persisted" will, I reckon, have more. Try to make blogposts fairly regularly, maybe between two and four a month, so that folk don't forget you're there. In the blogroll on the left are good examples of how to do it: Emma Darwin, Jo Prescott, Emma Lee, just for a start.

Keep the blog for writing-related posts, but on social media, talk about everything under the sun as well as writing. What you are trying to avoid is people seeing your name in the newsfeed and thinking "oh dear, Fred's boring on about his work again".

Think of yourself as part of a community, and your job online as promoting and growing that community - if you like, it's about increasing the diameter of the pie, rather than fighting for a bigger slice of what there currently is.

That's what occurs to me offhand, anyway.

Criticising the critics

A friend of mine lately had occasion to write a negative review of a poetry collection. The review is here: for the record, the quotes in it made me suspect that, though I shared some of the criticisms, I would probably have liked the book better than the reviewer did. Which means, in my view, that the review did its job; it indicated to me, the prospective reader (for whose benefit, let us not forget, reviews are written) what sort of poetry it was and how I was likely to react to it. I have before now bought a book on the basis of an unfavourable review, if it gave enough in the way of quotes and examples to make me think it was likely to be more to my taste than it had been to the reviewer's.

What the review was not was in any way personal or ad hominem, nor was it the result of careless reading, as apparently the publisher has suggested. The reason I think I'd have liked the book better is not that I think my reading would find anything the reviewer's had missed, but rather that we have different priorities - to oversimplify somewhat, the reviewer misses a human element in the collection (the "ghostly inhabitants" of the houses); I could probably do without it, though not having read the book, I can't say for sure. It is not a careless reading; it is one possible reading, by a reviewer who is herself a poet and of whom it certainly can't be said, as this publisher has, that her "reading skills are not up to the job".

It isn't unknown for poor readers, and even surprisingly unintelligent people, to write reviews for reputable publications. I cherish a memory of one, not of any book of mine, where the reviewer spent some time explaining a verse form she clearly thought the poet had invented: it was a sestina. If I'd been the author under discussion, I might have thought it worthwhile to contact the editor privately and point out that s/he was employing someone who needed to do a lot more reading and study before publishing reviews. It is also legitimate to correct actual errors of fact (one thinks of the reviewer who, not mindful of the dictum "I is a lie", assumed that a poem about IVF was autobiographical and that the poet's child had in fact been conceived that way: not so).

Other than that, the only dignified stance a poet can take on reviews is to ignore them. Even thanking someone for a good review is a bit problematic, especially if you know them, because it makes it sound as if they were doing you a personal favour, when in fact they were doing their job impartially. Yes, they may well miss things you think they should have spotted, or interpret something otherwise than you'd like. But that is arguably just as much your fault: you are the one trying to communicate your intent to reasonably intelligent folk (and if they aren't that, then you wouldn't really want your work to please them anyway).

Most of Bethany's principles on reviewing in her blog article are also mine. Unlike her, though, I do review work by poets who happen to be my friends or ex-students. I've been around a lot longer and would be hard put to it to avoid every poet I've ever had contact with. It doesn't stop me saying what I think about them, as I do about anything I review. Since I don't do it for money any more, I can afford not to bother with work that is emphatically not to my liking, so my reviews are more likely to be positive than not, but I hope they are balanced - when I do rave about something, it's because I am genuinely that keen on it. Even so, I have had the odd tight-lipped comment from a publisher on a "balanced review", where said publisher clearly wasn't using "balanced" as a compliment but rather as a synonym for "niggardly". It hasn't changed my estimation of the book in question - interesting but uneven - any more than a subsequent review which took a far more enthusiastic line has changed it. Again this was a matter of priorities and different readings: the constant repetition of a particular poem-structure struck me as tedious, him as powerful. That's my privilege, and his.

In that case two different reviews came up with two different readings, which is the ideal situation. The more plentiful reviews are, the more this happens and the less one reading can skew the reader's views in advance. This is one reason I have been trying, all year, to do at least two reviews, preferably of new work, a month. Poets are always moaning about a lack of reviews: very few of them try to do much about it on each other's behalf. But my advice would be: if you don't like the quality of reviewing, do some yourself.