Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 28
October 4, 2015
Review of The Sage of Waterloo by Leona Francombe, pub. W W Norton & Co, 2015
It isn't altogether a coincidence that I should have read two novels with animal narrators within a few months, because I like animal narrators. The fact that one (Three Bags Full) was by a Leonie Swann while this one, The Sage of Waterloo, is by a Leona Francombe, is complete coincidence, though at first I went googling to see if they might be the same person. They aren't.
I say narrators: in fact Three Bags Full has an outside narrative voice, though it doesn't see through human eyes. Its main protagonists are sheep and we see through their eyes throughout, but there is no actual first-person narration. In The Sage of Waterloo, we do have a first person narrator, the rabbit William, who lives at Hougoumont near the site of the Battle of Waterloo. He is one of a long line of Hougoumont rabbits, who are assumed to have a folk memory of the events that have taken place there. His grandmother Old Lavender, a sort of rabbit repository of folk wisdom, remarks "Landscapes where great passion has been spilled resonate. Not loudly. But loud enough for most wild creatures to detect. Once set in motion, the vibrations continue forever."
This is a plausible and interesting idea enough; wild animals can detect an oncoming earthquake, after all, and most battlefields have some resonance even for humans. But for me, the novel's narration does not work consistently, because William and his friends are not consistently rabbit-like. If an animal protagonist is not to turn into a furry human, it is essential for it to think and react in accord with its nature, which, for me, the sheep of Three Bags Full did all the time. William does sometimes sound like a rabbit – in his instinctive fear of open spaces, his way of "reading the air", his identification of the moon as some sort of divinity. But at other times he sounds too human, particularly when his author is using him to pass on historical information about Waterloo. For the purposes of the novel, I can go along with the notion that his grandmother, by listening intently to the conversation of visiting tourists, has picked up and passed on to him a lot of knowledge about the battle and its era. What I can't credit is that either she or he would be quite so interested in the history and nature of another species. Grandmother's condemnations of war: "Humans learn to do this to each other. Therefore one day they must unlearn it, before it's too late and all of them succumb to the same madness" just don't ring true. Nor do some of William's comparisons – "like a nun's cap"? I can credit that he might have seen a nun and even know what one was, but not that something so irrelevant to his own daily experience would occur to him as a comparison.
There are really two books here: William leading his rabbit life, which can be quite affecting, and an imaginative re-creation of Waterloo and its aftermath, which can also be interesting when it doesn't sound too much like a history lesson. But they don't really mesh.
I say narrators: in fact Three Bags Full has an outside narrative voice, though it doesn't see through human eyes. Its main protagonists are sheep and we see through their eyes throughout, but there is no actual first-person narration. In The Sage of Waterloo, we do have a first person narrator, the rabbit William, who lives at Hougoumont near the site of the Battle of Waterloo. He is one of a long line of Hougoumont rabbits, who are assumed to have a folk memory of the events that have taken place there. His grandmother Old Lavender, a sort of rabbit repository of folk wisdom, remarks "Landscapes where great passion has been spilled resonate. Not loudly. But loud enough for most wild creatures to detect. Once set in motion, the vibrations continue forever."
This is a plausible and interesting idea enough; wild animals can detect an oncoming earthquake, after all, and most battlefields have some resonance even for humans. But for me, the novel's narration does not work consistently, because William and his friends are not consistently rabbit-like. If an animal protagonist is not to turn into a furry human, it is essential for it to think and react in accord with its nature, which, for me, the sheep of Three Bags Full did all the time. William does sometimes sound like a rabbit – in his instinctive fear of open spaces, his way of "reading the air", his identification of the moon as some sort of divinity. But at other times he sounds too human, particularly when his author is using him to pass on historical information about Waterloo. For the purposes of the novel, I can go along with the notion that his grandmother, by listening intently to the conversation of visiting tourists, has picked up and passed on to him a lot of knowledge about the battle and its era. What I can't credit is that either she or he would be quite so interested in the history and nature of another species. Grandmother's condemnations of war: "Humans learn to do this to each other. Therefore one day they must unlearn it, before it's too late and all of them succumb to the same madness" just don't ring true. Nor do some of William's comparisons – "like a nun's cap"? I can credit that he might have seen a nun and even know what one was, but not that something so irrelevant to his own daily experience would occur to him as a comparison.
There are really two books here: William leading his rabbit life, which can be quite affecting, and an imaginative re-creation of Waterloo and its aftermath, which can also be interesting when it doesn't sound too much like a history lesson. But they don't really mesh.
October 2, 2015
Review of Fishbowl by Bradley Somer, pub. Random House 2015
This is a very readable, humorous, engaging novel – just don't judge it by its first and last chapters, In Which, to borrow the format of the chapter headings, Our Author Is A Little Too Pleased With His Own Narrative Techniques.
I was attracted by the lure of a character called Ian the Goldfish, whose journey in search of freedom forms part of the book. This is so, and Ian is indeed a welcome if intermittent visitor to these pages, but he's an observer rather than a character, and fairly peripheral to the action. He's really there as a metaphor: his "fishbowl" (or goldfish bowl as the UK would know it) is an image for the apartment block which really is at the centre of things. Nearly all the characters either live in or visit the block, and it is the connecting link between their stories. This is actually quite an old-fashioned technique: the use of a building or something similar as a hook to hang stories on was popular in films and novels of the 40s and 50s, (and in fact the narrative voice of Fishbowl occasionally reminds me of a 1951 novel by the once hugely popular, now largely forgotten, Norman Collins, Children of the Archbishop, in which a London bus is used in the same way). The first chapter of Fishbowl announces this intent, unfortunately at some length; it takes four pages to say, basically, "this story is set in an apartment block".
When, however, he's done expatiating on his theme of "a box that contains life and everything else", things pick up almost as fast as Ian descends 27 floors. Somers' people are well drawn and easy to become involved with, and his use of the out-of-order elevator as a plot device is masterly, especially when combined with how he switches between stories so that we are sometimes ahead of the characters – we are awaiting breathlessly the meeting of two unsuspecting women on a staircase for a considerable time before it happens. The short chapters are not only very easily readable, they also suit the episodic nature of the action and maintain the pace. There's no doubt that we end up wanting to know what becomes of the under-appreciated janitor Jimenez, the obsessive-compulsive Claire, the vulnerable but resourceful Herman and many others, not forgetting Ian.
It soon becomes clear that many of the inhabitants of this block are, for one reason or another, lonely: the social isolation that can be generated in a community that consists of boxes within a box is well conveyed. Ian never finds any real meeting-point with his snail companion Troy; they are too different, but some of the people in the bigger fishbowl are luckier. In fact, for my taste there are a few too many happy endings neatly tied up with bows – people are miraculously presented with cures for mental conditions, new jobs and families to replace those they have lost and some of these don't convince me (Herman's for one, because the authorities would not, I think allow it). And in the last chapter the author again becomes a rather irritating presence, summing things up, telling us what may have happened after the book ends (surely the reader's privilege to speculate on?) and veering into cosy cliché with statements like "everything happens for a reason". For all the contemporary setting, he strikes me as quite a conventionally omniscient authorial voice, what Thackeray called a puppet-master. I doubt that, at the moment, he would let any of his characters surprise him, and he'll probably be a better writer when he does.
Nevertheless, I like this book. The man can tell a story and he has, for the most part, an engaging style. Because there are so many stories and outcomes, I'm finding it hard to quote without spoilers, so here is Ian on his descent, glancing in at the passing windows of the tower block and reflecting on his own fishbowl. This is not a spoiler, because if you think there can be but one end to a goldfish who falls 27 floors, you are wrong.
I was attracted by the lure of a character called Ian the Goldfish, whose journey in search of freedom forms part of the book. This is so, and Ian is indeed a welcome if intermittent visitor to these pages, but he's an observer rather than a character, and fairly peripheral to the action. He's really there as a metaphor: his "fishbowl" (or goldfish bowl as the UK would know it) is an image for the apartment block which really is at the centre of things. Nearly all the characters either live in or visit the block, and it is the connecting link between their stories. This is actually quite an old-fashioned technique: the use of a building or something similar as a hook to hang stories on was popular in films and novels of the 40s and 50s, (and in fact the narrative voice of Fishbowl occasionally reminds me of a 1951 novel by the once hugely popular, now largely forgotten, Norman Collins, Children of the Archbishop, in which a London bus is used in the same way). The first chapter of Fishbowl announces this intent, unfortunately at some length; it takes four pages to say, basically, "this story is set in an apartment block".
When, however, he's done expatiating on his theme of "a box that contains life and everything else", things pick up almost as fast as Ian descends 27 floors. Somers' people are well drawn and easy to become involved with, and his use of the out-of-order elevator as a plot device is masterly, especially when combined with how he switches between stories so that we are sometimes ahead of the characters – we are awaiting breathlessly the meeting of two unsuspecting women on a staircase for a considerable time before it happens. The short chapters are not only very easily readable, they also suit the episodic nature of the action and maintain the pace. There's no doubt that we end up wanting to know what becomes of the under-appreciated janitor Jimenez, the obsessive-compulsive Claire, the vulnerable but resourceful Herman and many others, not forgetting Ian.
It soon becomes clear that many of the inhabitants of this block are, for one reason or another, lonely: the social isolation that can be generated in a community that consists of boxes within a box is well conveyed. Ian never finds any real meeting-point with his snail companion Troy; they are too different, but some of the people in the bigger fishbowl are luckier. In fact, for my taste there are a few too many happy endings neatly tied up with bows – people are miraculously presented with cures for mental conditions, new jobs and families to replace those they have lost and some of these don't convince me (Herman's for one, because the authorities would not, I think allow it). And in the last chapter the author again becomes a rather irritating presence, summing things up, telling us what may have happened after the book ends (surely the reader's privilege to speculate on?) and veering into cosy cliché with statements like "everything happens for a reason". For all the contemporary setting, he strikes me as quite a conventionally omniscient authorial voice, what Thackeray called a puppet-master. I doubt that, at the moment, he would let any of his characters surprise him, and he'll probably be a better writer when he does.
Nevertheless, I like this book. The man can tell a story and he has, for the most part, an engaging style. Because there are so many stories and outcomes, I'm finding it hard to quote without spoilers, so here is Ian on his descent, glancing in at the passing windows of the tower block and reflecting on his own fishbowl. This is not a spoiler, because if you think there can be but one end to a goldfish who falls 27 floors, you are wrong.
Ian thinks of his fishbowl, now empty save for the algae, the pink plastic castle and Troy, slipping across the glass with his interminable munching. Ian thinks of what a lonely thing Troy's shell would be without the chewy organic mass of Troy to inhabit it. Ian won't miss the sound of Troy eating. He won't miss the constant slurping and sucking noises, the ripping noise Troy makes day and night as he sucks the algae from the walls. He won't miss that chiefly because his fishbowl is no longer even a memory for him.
Ian is distracted from his thoughts by something he spies through the dust-streaked glass of the balcony sliding door to the apartment he passes on the fifteenth floor. In the fraction of a second it takes, his mind captures a still life of the goings-on inside.
September 26, 2015
It tells a story. Or several.
I've loved this picture ever since I first stood in front of it in Munich with my mouth hanging open. It's only just occurred to me to figure out why, and it has nowt to do with the quality of the brushwork or composition or whatnot, because I know as much about all that as your average hippo does, and certainly less than a painting elephant in Thailand.
I think the reason has some relevance to preferences in poetry: it's to do with narrative. I did figure out long ago that I need a picture to have a narrative element, and preferably one involving living creatures. I used to put my indifference to Gainsborough portraits down to the fact that the subjects were all toffs, and to my suspicion that he himself was indifferent to them, and couldn't wait to collect the dosh and be off to paint something he liked better. But now I think it's that they have no narrative. They are just sitting there being painted: I can't imagine them having a life outside the painting.
Not all portraiture is devoid of narrative. Hockney's double portraits tend to crackle with unresolved tension between the subjects, as in the Celia & Ossie Clark portrait where their emotional distance, expressed through their body language, is such that you can't help thinking each is mentally composing a letter to a divorce lawyer. So one can construct some sort of a narrative - how did they get to this pass, what happens next, most importantly, who'll get custody of the cat?
In his "Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool", Hockney constructs a different kind of narrative simply by having a young man, whose back is to us, looking out of the picture, beyond the frame. Not only the eye but the mind is drawn there, wondering what is happening beyond our view, and how the unseen face is reacting to it. Caspar David Friedrich is a great one for depicting people with their faces turned away, so that we must imagine the most important part of them, where the emotions show.
But not all narrative pictures stick in my mind. For that, they need one more quality: the potential to be variously interpreted. "And when did you last see your father?" is packed with narrative, but there's only one possible interpretation of what is happening and what's going to happen next. The same goes for all those Victorian paintings with helpful titles like Arriving at the Inn, Waiting for News, Farewell to the Soldier... I like them, sure; they do at least have a narrative, unlike some Mondrian geometrical design or Pollock squirt from which I can't construct a story to save my life. But the story is too clearly told and has too few alternatives to it.
This is what I love about "Riding Couple". When I was young, I constructed an elopement narrative from it; they're waiting for a ferry to cross the river away from her outraged parents, thinks I. Now older, I can see that the horse's high, elaborate step speaks against it. That's the sort of highly trained animal you take for an evening outing with your accredited sweetheart, not the sort you escape on. And yet... being loth to lose my elopement fantasy altogether, I can suppose the ground is boggy near the river and the horse, clearly a fastidious creature, is high-stepping to avoid the miry bits. Is that town, that looks as if it might be on an island in the river, a refuge or somewhere to escape from? It looks a beguiling place, but who knows?The thing lends itself to all manner of stories, not just one, and that's what keeps drawing me back.
The point is, I rather think the same applies to poems. I want them to tell me a story, but I don't want it spelled out and tied up in a bow. I want to be a co-creator and to be able to fill in blanks myself. And I want, in the end, for there to be several possible stories, not just the one.
I think the reason has some relevance to preferences in poetry: it's to do with narrative. I did figure out long ago that I need a picture to have a narrative element, and preferably one involving living creatures. I used to put my indifference to Gainsborough portraits down to the fact that the subjects were all toffs, and to my suspicion that he himself was indifferent to them, and couldn't wait to collect the dosh and be off to paint something he liked better. But now I think it's that they have no narrative. They are just sitting there being painted: I can't imagine them having a life outside the painting.
Not all portraiture is devoid of narrative. Hockney's double portraits tend to crackle with unresolved tension between the subjects, as in the Celia & Ossie Clark portrait where their emotional distance, expressed through their body language, is such that you can't help thinking each is mentally composing a letter to a divorce lawyer. So one can construct some sort of a narrative - how did they get to this pass, what happens next, most importantly, who'll get custody of the cat?
In his "Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool", Hockney constructs a different kind of narrative simply by having a young man, whose back is to us, looking out of the picture, beyond the frame. Not only the eye but the mind is drawn there, wondering what is happening beyond our view, and how the unseen face is reacting to it. Caspar David Friedrich is a great one for depicting people with their faces turned away, so that we must imagine the most important part of them, where the emotions show.
But not all narrative pictures stick in my mind. For that, they need one more quality: the potential to be variously interpreted. "And when did you last see your father?" is packed with narrative, but there's only one possible interpretation of what is happening and what's going to happen next. The same goes for all those Victorian paintings with helpful titles like Arriving at the Inn, Waiting for News, Farewell to the Soldier... I like them, sure; they do at least have a narrative, unlike some Mondrian geometrical design or Pollock squirt from which I can't construct a story to save my life. But the story is too clearly told and has too few alternatives to it.
This is what I love about "Riding Couple". When I was young, I constructed an elopement narrative from it; they're waiting for a ferry to cross the river away from her outraged parents, thinks I. Now older, I can see that the horse's high, elaborate step speaks against it. That's the sort of highly trained animal you take for an evening outing with your accredited sweetheart, not the sort you escape on. And yet... being loth to lose my elopement fantasy altogether, I can suppose the ground is boggy near the river and the horse, clearly a fastidious creature, is high-stepping to avoid the miry bits. Is that town, that looks as if it might be on an island in the river, a refuge or somewhere to escape from? It looks a beguiling place, but who knows?The thing lends itself to all manner of stories, not just one, and that's what keeps drawing me back.
The point is, I rather think the same applies to poems. I want them to tell me a story, but I don't want it spelled out and tied up in a bow. I want to be a co-creator and to be able to fill in blanks myself. And I want, in the end, for there to be several possible stories, not just the one.
September 2, 2015
Review of The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth, pub Unbound
To begin with the feature most likely to deter the reader: this novel is written in a form of simplified Old English and yes, it takes a few pages to get into, but you get used to it (it is soon clear, for instance, that "sc" is our "sh", so that scip is ship). It's a bit of a wasted opportunity, in that he mostly doesn't use the tension between this dialect and our own to create a shimmering layer of puns and allusions, as Russell Hoban did in Riddley Walker. But if you can read Riddley Walker, you can read this.
Ignore the title, the back-cover blurb and the quotes from reviewers, at least two of whom must have been reading with their eyes shut. They could have you thinking this is a book "about", as opposed to merely set in, the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and that it's a Kingsleyesque tale of Noble Saxons and Nasty Normans. Thanks be, it is far more complicated, mainly because it is in fact the tale of our Saxon protagonist-narrator Buccmaster, who is far nastier than any Norman on the premises.
I must tread carefully to avoid spoilers here, because Buccmaster is not only an unreliable narrator but an unaware one. He has buried parts of his past deep in his mind, and re-invented others, so that the self-image he projects and believes in is nothing like his real personality, which emerges gradually. If you happen to have read Maria McCann's fine English Civil War novel, As Meat Loves Salt, you will recall her protagonist-narrator Jacob Cullen; Buccmaster is not unlike him.
His political credo, while intimately connected with his personal hang-ups, is less complicated. He is an extreme individualist, a libertarian who resents interference in his affairs by any king or civic authority; had he lived in our own time he would certainly have agreed with Thatcher that there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. He may hate William, but he had no more time for Harold Godwinson; to this Lincolnshire fenman, "Harold of Wessex" was nearly as much of a foreigner as William of Normandy. He refuses Harold's call to arms, on the ground that he would fight only to protect his own house and family. In fact he can't accept any authority whatever, and the buried reason for that is much as you would expect. He also lives in the past, almost literally; he hankers for the return of a set of gods who by then had been distant memories in Saxon England for some centuries, and again this is connected with his damaged family relationships.
A couple of flaws to note: the pace, generally excellent, flags midway, admittedly when the characters are at a stand, wondering what to do next, but novelists can convey that without actually boring the reader. And there is a totally irrelevant minor character, Aelfgifu, whose thread is heart-sinkingly predictable, in no way adds to our knowledge of the protagonist and I suspect was included for all the wrong reasons.
Kingsnorth has written the story of a deeply troubled man, played out against the background of the Conquest. This is why his following historical note baffles me. It stresses the background: the Norman atrocities, the heroic resistance, the way the invasion changed society for centuries (and, by implication, entirely for the worse; at least he mentions no benefits). But why, then, has he chosen as his Saxon protagonist a man not just dislikeable and damaged but more of a danger to anyone in his vicinity than even the invaders? Duke William was certainly a bastard, in every sense of the word, but at least he was a sane bastard. By the end of this novel, one is inclining to the view that anyone who is Buccmaster's enemy must have something to be said for them. Also, since we know his word cannot be trusted, we may wonder how much to believe about the evil the Normans have done. Nor was his condition caused by the invasion; he was destroying his own life long before the fleet hove in sight. A bad man can fight for a good cause, but novelists don't usually choose him as the cause's spokesman. One would think the author was perhaps trying to convey that there is no wrong and right side in war, but that is not what the historical note implies.
The author's intention is thus a puzzle, but this has no bearing on the novel's artistic and narrative merits. It is in fact a gripping tale; its narration is fascinating and skilfully handled, and its physical background vividly brought alive. In this extract Buccmaster recalls being on a mere in the fens with his grandfather:
It can also be very moving, as any account of a way of life coming to an end can be. Even when we know what kind of man Buccmaster is, his memory of the last happy day in his life, in a village celebrating May, cannot help but strike a chord:
Ignore the title, the back-cover blurb and the quotes from reviewers, at least two of whom must have been reading with their eyes shut. They could have you thinking this is a book "about", as opposed to merely set in, the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and that it's a Kingsleyesque tale of Noble Saxons and Nasty Normans. Thanks be, it is far more complicated, mainly because it is in fact the tale of our Saxon protagonist-narrator Buccmaster, who is far nastier than any Norman on the premises.
I must tread carefully to avoid spoilers here, because Buccmaster is not only an unreliable narrator but an unaware one. He has buried parts of his past deep in his mind, and re-invented others, so that the self-image he projects and believes in is nothing like his real personality, which emerges gradually. If you happen to have read Maria McCann's fine English Civil War novel, As Meat Loves Salt, you will recall her protagonist-narrator Jacob Cullen; Buccmaster is not unlike him.
His political credo, while intimately connected with his personal hang-ups, is less complicated. He is an extreme individualist, a libertarian who resents interference in his affairs by any king or civic authority; had he lived in our own time he would certainly have agreed with Thatcher that there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. He may hate William, but he had no more time for Harold Godwinson; to this Lincolnshire fenman, "Harold of Wessex" was nearly as much of a foreigner as William of Normandy. He refuses Harold's call to arms, on the ground that he would fight only to protect his own house and family. In fact he can't accept any authority whatever, and the buried reason for that is much as you would expect. He also lives in the past, almost literally; he hankers for the return of a set of gods who by then had been distant memories in Saxon England for some centuries, and again this is connected with his damaged family relationships.
A couple of flaws to note: the pace, generally excellent, flags midway, admittedly when the characters are at a stand, wondering what to do next, but novelists can convey that without actually boring the reader. And there is a totally irrelevant minor character, Aelfgifu, whose thread is heart-sinkingly predictable, in no way adds to our knowledge of the protagonist and I suspect was included for all the wrong reasons.
Kingsnorth has written the story of a deeply troubled man, played out against the background of the Conquest. This is why his following historical note baffles me. It stresses the background: the Norman atrocities, the heroic resistance, the way the invasion changed society for centuries (and, by implication, entirely for the worse; at least he mentions no benefits). But why, then, has he chosen as his Saxon protagonist a man not just dislikeable and damaged but more of a danger to anyone in his vicinity than even the invaders? Duke William was certainly a bastard, in every sense of the word, but at least he was a sane bastard. By the end of this novel, one is inclining to the view that anyone who is Buccmaster's enemy must have something to be said for them. Also, since we know his word cannot be trusted, we may wonder how much to believe about the evil the Normans have done. Nor was his condition caused by the invasion; he was destroying his own life long before the fleet hove in sight. A bad man can fight for a good cause, but novelists don't usually choose him as the cause's spokesman. One would think the author was perhaps trying to convey that there is no wrong and right side in war, but that is not what the historical note implies.
The author's intention is thus a puzzle, but this has no bearing on the novel's artistic and narrative merits. It is in fact a gripping tale; its narration is fascinating and skilfully handled, and its physical background vividly brought alive. In this extract Buccmaster recalls being on a mere in the fens with his grandfather:
under the boat under the water and not so deop was the stocc of a great blaec treow torn to its root lic a tooth in the mouth of an eald wif. a great treow it was wid and blaec as the fyrs aesc blaec as the deorcness beyond the hall on a niht when the mona sleeps and as i was locan I seen another and another and I colde see that under this mere was a great holt a great eald holt of treows bigger than any I had seen efer….
It can also be very moving, as any account of a way of life coming to an end can be. Even when we know what kind of man Buccmaster is, his memory of the last happy day in his life, in a village celebrating May, cannot help but strike a chord:
oh I can sae these words and try to tell what it was lic there but naht can gif to thu what was in my heorte as I seen all of this cuman in to place […] oh it was the last daeg of the world.
September 1, 2015
Review of Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers, ed John Greening, pub. Boydell Press.
Declaration of interest: I have a poem in this, but it's just the one and it seems a bit OTT not to review a whole anthology on that account.
Poems about pictures are ekphrasis, but according to its definition, this can't be used for poems about music; in fact I don't know that there is a name for them. Nevertheless, they clearly have a lot in common with ekphrastic poems, in that they try to express in one art form the effect produced by another. At least, some do. As the interesting introduction points out, some engage with the music, others with the composer's life, others still with the relevance of the music to the writer's own life (poets do have a tendency to look at the world and make it all about them).
I listened to a lot of classical music when younger, then drifted away from it and haven't really listened to any for decades, which means that the more recent composers who serve as inspiration here, I have neither heard, nor, in some cases, heard of. I don't think this disqualifies me from reviewing the book, because a poem must work as a poem, not merely as a homage, and something should still come through to a non-expert. It does mean that those poems which engage with some aspect of the composer's life are liable to make a more immediate impact on me. "Buxtehude's Daughter" (Alistair Elliot), patiently waiting for one of her organist father's assistants to secure the reversion of his job by marrying her, was an old friend from biographies of Handel; he didn't marry her, but another organist did. This poem, narrated in the lady's voice, is not really about music, but about someone on its fringes who might have become bitter but was actually rather good at making the best of things. Elliot brings her alive by catching a very down-to-earth, unremarkable but engaging voice:
When Handel came, he found me elderly.
He was eighteen and I was twenty-eight -
The sad arithmetic of too soon, too late…
I wonder if he ever thinks of me
At night, in London. He liked my soup that day.
Strange to know someone famous far away.
Since I've a passion for biography and history, it may be inevitable that the narrative and anecdotal poems, which don't really need to be about composers as such, appeal to me most. There is a danger, of course, that such poems become too purely narrative, too "this happened and then that", as, for me, is the case with Mick Imlah's "Scottish Play" (which is more about Kathleen Ferrier than Gluck). But many find the universal in the particular. John Greening's own wry little poem "Field", about a composer who apparently had the ill-luck to invent the nocturne only to be eclipsed in the form by Chopin, is something any artist, in any field, could relate to. With those poems that are less about the composer than about his effect on, or parallel with, the poet's own life, success depends, again, on how far they transcend the personal. Lotte Kramer's "Fugue", with a killer ending I won't spoil by quoting, is "personal" yet also universal, a grim and brilliant reminder that being able to appreciate Great Music does not necessarily make one a better person.
Indeed one danger of this kind of poem, and it happens also in ekphrastic poems, is that of undue reverence toward the subject. I hear it in Ronald Duncan's "Lament for Ben" and occasionally elsewhere. Alistair Elliot and Oliver Reynolds are particularly welcome for their avoidance of it, as is the knockabout humour of Heath-Stubbs's Audenesque ballad on Salieri. And James Reeves's "Knew the Master", alone in the anthology, articulates the way reverence for "the classics", in any art form, can stifle new work by denying it an audience.
It's impossible to do full justice, in a review, to an anthology with 180-odd pages of poems. One observation: quoting numbers in a poem does not often make for memorable lines, even if they do have the letter K in front of them – better to put it in an epigraph, as Anne Stevenson does. Stand-out poems for me included Andrew Motion's "Rhapsody"; I'd never heard of Butterworth but who could resist the idea of a man filmed morris-dancing in 1913, a recording still accessible on YouTube though the man himself died three years later on the Somme?
One very interesting thing Greening notes in his introduction: there were very few poems about composers written before the twentieth century. I would guess it's the same with ekphrastic poems, and would love to know why, suddenly, artists started writing about other artists in this way. It goes further than figuring the poet as composer, too. For Douglas Dunn, the music of Bach "restates the rhythms of a loch" and becomes itself a landscape ("Loch Music"). Charles Tomlinson reinvents Bach as a bee-keeper "topping up the cells/with the honey of C major" ("If Bach had been a Beekeeper"), while Tony Roberts, in "Barkbröd", has his narrator seeing Sibelius through the medium of cheese… Jo Shapcott, in her poem about a Schoenberg orchestration of a Bach piece, pertinently asks "Where does it come from, this passion/for layers?" Where indeed, and why now: why is the present day so obsessed with "seeing" one thing through the medium of another? It's a fascinating question, raised by an unexpectedly eclectic anthology; it may be on one subject but the poems couldn't be more varied.
August 19, 2015
Answers? What answers?
"Maybe a poet could come along who could solve all our problems, but I haven't seen him yet."
Excellent interview with James Dickey in the Paris Review, which specialises in doing good interviews with writers. Dickey was at that point talking about writers being urged to make public pronouncements, and pointing out that if they were experts on politics, economics or anything else, they probably wouldn't be sitting around writing poems very much. But his words reminded me of something slightly different, a tendency in criticism best represented by some poet-critic years back, who frequently complained that the poetry he was reviewing raised questions and then refused to suggest answers - in his phrase, it "threw its hands up".
I've never understood this notion that (a) there must be an answer to every question, whether practical or existential, and (b) that if there is, it's any part of a poet's or fiction writer's job to find it. If there's one thing I loathe, it's the kind of writing that wants to tie things up with the pretty bow of an "answer". To practical questions of politics or economics there may be answers, and it's for politicians and economists to find them. If there are any such convenient answers to questions of life, the universe and everything, one would rather expect philosophers to have found them by now, and if they haven't, it seems mighty unlikely that a 40-line poem can do it. If it tries, as often as not it achieves the kind of superficial glibness you expect rather of a Facebook post.
What, for instance, is the "answer" to the agonising fact that has been the theme of so many poems: that we're all going to die and be forgotten? There isn't one, at least not unless you accept "we're all going to a better place" and it is notable that even Parson Herrick, who in his day job should have believed that implicitly, doesn't really seem to have been satisfied with it, at least if we judge by "To the Virgins, to make much of Time". That doesn't mean poets shouldn't write about it.
In fact, it seems to me that one purpose of poetry is precisely to raise questions, not in order to answer them but in order to make others think about them. Another reason I dislike the idea of poems trying to provide answers is that it reduces the reader to the status of a spectator, whereas I think writing should be a participant sport. The likelihood is, in fact, that when it comes to ways of dealing with the world, there are as many partial or possible "answers" as there are individuals. It is not the poet's business to point the reader toward one or another; it is enough to be aware, and make others aware, of the existence of questions.
Excellent interview with James Dickey in the Paris Review, which specialises in doing good interviews with writers. Dickey was at that point talking about writers being urged to make public pronouncements, and pointing out that if they were experts on politics, economics or anything else, they probably wouldn't be sitting around writing poems very much. But his words reminded me of something slightly different, a tendency in criticism best represented by some poet-critic years back, who frequently complained that the poetry he was reviewing raised questions and then refused to suggest answers - in his phrase, it "threw its hands up".
I've never understood this notion that (a) there must be an answer to every question, whether practical or existential, and (b) that if there is, it's any part of a poet's or fiction writer's job to find it. If there's one thing I loathe, it's the kind of writing that wants to tie things up with the pretty bow of an "answer". To practical questions of politics or economics there may be answers, and it's for politicians and economists to find them. If there are any such convenient answers to questions of life, the universe and everything, one would rather expect philosophers to have found them by now, and if they haven't, it seems mighty unlikely that a 40-line poem can do it. If it tries, as often as not it achieves the kind of superficial glibness you expect rather of a Facebook post.
What, for instance, is the "answer" to the agonising fact that has been the theme of so many poems: that we're all going to die and be forgotten? There isn't one, at least not unless you accept "we're all going to a better place" and it is notable that even Parson Herrick, who in his day job should have believed that implicitly, doesn't really seem to have been satisfied with it, at least if we judge by "To the Virgins, to make much of Time". That doesn't mean poets shouldn't write about it.
In fact, it seems to me that one purpose of poetry is precisely to raise questions, not in order to answer them but in order to make others think about them. Another reason I dislike the idea of poems trying to provide answers is that it reduces the reader to the status of a spectator, whereas I think writing should be a participant sport. The likelihood is, in fact, that when it comes to ways of dealing with the world, there are as many partial or possible "answers" as there are individuals. It is not the poet's business to point the reader toward one or another; it is enough to be aware, and make others aware, of the existence of questions.
August 7, 2015
Review of Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, pub. Black Swan 2007
This unmissable book is a murder mystery, in which the detectives happen to be a flock of Irish sheep (I knew I was going to like it from the moment I read the list of "Dramatis Oves"). And no, it isn't aimed at children or young adults, nor, though it has richly comic elements, is it purely comedy. We are very much in the sheep viewpoint, in that there is no scene at which sheep are not present, though, being humans, we sometimes see what we are watching differently from them. Not better, just differently. It is because we see through their eyes that we know, long before any of the humans, that two characters are related – the sheep can at once tell that they have the same smell. And though, obviously, these aren't your average sheep, they don't think like woolly humans either:
They use their own experience of the world, and of humans (and some, like the Hebridean ram Othello, have more than others) to try to make sense of the sudden death of their shepherd George and the peculiar behaviour of the surviving inhabitants of Glennkill (the macaronic pun on kill and cil, the Gaelic for church, is no accident). They also pool their varying talents. Chief detective Miss Maple, who didn't get her name for the reason you think, is intensely curious and intelligent; Othello knows more about people than most; Mopple, a merino with an insatiable appetite, also has a good memory. And then there's the enigmatic Melmoth….
Part of the appeal of this book is that the sheep, though their individual characters are every bit as well-defined and engaging as any human's, never quite stop being sheep. The landscape of smells in the barn:
And at the same time they are more than sheep, or maybe sheep's mental processes just are more than we know anyway; who can say for sure that this mental soliloquy isn't going on inside Melmoth's head as he returns from who knows where?
These characters become very real to us, so that, watching the humans along with Melmoth, we share George's puzzlement (and contempt) when he and butcher Ham stumble upon a dead man's body which the butcher cannot bring himself to touch:
Reviews of murder mysteries ought not to contain spoilers, so I'll add only that this isn't much like any other novel I have read recently and that I would be very sorry not to have been pointed in its direction. It's a re-reader for sure.
"If it's a hole in his memory we ought to stop it up with more memories," said Cordelia. "You stop up a hole in the earth with more earth."
"But you don't stop up a rat-hole with more rats," said Cloud.
"You could," Cordelia insisted, "if they were very fat rats."
They use their own experience of the world, and of humans (and some, like the Hebridean ram Othello, have more than others) to try to make sense of the sudden death of their shepherd George and the peculiar behaviour of the surviving inhabitants of Glennkill (the macaronic pun on kill and cil, the Gaelic for church, is no accident). They also pool their varying talents. Chief detective Miss Maple, who didn't get her name for the reason you think, is intensely curious and intelligent; Othello knows more about people than most; Mopple, a merino with an insatiable appetite, also has a good memory. And then there's the enigmatic Melmoth….
Part of the appeal of this book is that the sheep, though their individual characters are every bit as well-defined and engaging as any human's, never quite stop being sheep. The landscape of smells in the barn:
The heat had hunted old smells out of all the corners. A young mouse who had died under the wooden planks last summer. George sweating as he forked hay through the hatch in the roof and down on them, a fragrant shower. A screw that had fallen out of his radio and still smelled the way it used to, of metal and music.
And at the same time they are more than sheep, or maybe sheep's mental processes just are more than we know anyway; who can say for sure that this mental soliloquy isn't going on inside Melmoth's head as he returns from who knows where?
On the other side of the dolmen youth grazed, his own youth, with strong limbs and a sense of joy in its belly, but stupid, so stupid you could almost feel sorry for it in its happiness. On the other side of the dolmen was the meadow that couldn't exist, the Way Back. He had looked for it all over the world, under smooth stones, on the far side of the wind, in the eyes of night-birds, in pools of quiet water. […] Now the Way Back had curled up, like a woodlouse, into a single step to be taken.
These characters become very real to us, so that, watching the humans along with Melmoth, we share George's puzzlement (and contempt) when he and butcher Ham stumble upon a dead man's body which the butcher cannot bring himself to touch:
"That's different. Completely different. My God, George, this is a body."
George shrugged. "Did you think you worked with some kind of fruit in your job?"
Reviews of murder mysteries ought not to contain spoilers, so I'll add only that this isn't much like any other novel I have read recently and that I would be very sorry not to have been pointed in its direction. It's a re-reader for sure.
August 4, 2015
Interview with Steve Ely
Steve Ely's first collection, Oswald's Book of Hours (Smokestack Books 2013) was shortlisted for the Forward first collection prize and I reviewed it on this blog. His second, Englaland, came out from Smokestack in 2015 – also reviewed here.
SHEENAGH: Your work is clearly very rooted in a particular landscape, and every point in that landscape's history seems equally present to you – there aren't many ways in which you remind me of Cavafy, but one resemblance I do see is how people like Oswald of Northumbria and Nevison the highwayman are still alive in your mental and emotional territory, just as Cavafy evidently wouldn't have been surprised to turn a corner in Alexandria and bump into Mark Antony or a priest from the Serapeion. How long has this sense of past-in-present been with you, and informing your work?
STEVE: The sense of past-in-present, as you put it, has been with me for as long as I can remember. As a kid I’d attempt to imagine the layerings of the past that had shaped the various aspects of the landscapes I roamed in — how the fields and woods became, the backstories of footpaths, copses, ponds and valleys. This tendency became more intense and urgent in my teens as reading began to inform and transform my experiences of place — and as my experiences of place began to similarly inform and transform my reading. That dialectic enabled the development of an imagined historical perspective that contextualised and sacralised that which had hitherto been quotidian — particular trees, meadows, views — or whole topographies. As this tendency developed, I came to see landscape as something akin to a living organism embodying a transgenerational integrity in which the past was inexorably alive in the present.
Two books were particularly important in this development. The first was Aaron Wilkinson’s A History of South Kirkby. (South Kirkby is the place I was brought up in. I’ve spend most of my life in the area.) I first read the book aged around fifteen and it sent me rambling around my local area (and into my local libraries as I followed up Wilkinson’s bibliography) with fresh eyes, triangulating landscape with past people and events and enabling me to connect my parish with a larger history (the Danelaw, the Norman Conquest, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Wars of the Roses, enclosure and the English & Industrial Revolutions).
Arthur Ruston & Denis Witney’s Hooton Pagnell: The Evolution of a Yorkshire Village (1934), also became important to my sense of the present in the past. The Hooton Pagnell estate was the main poaching/bird-nesting territories territory of my youth. I knew every hawthorn bush and rat-hole of that estate. I didn’t encounter Ruston and Witney until I was well into my twenties, but the millennial scope of the book provided an account of the landscape that allowed me to see my personal experiences in and around the village (and the neighbouring Frickley Estate) as part of a continuous parade of human activity from the Yorkshire Danes Swein and Arketil, to the planting of Frickley pit. I discovered, for example, that ‘Badger Balk’, (the widest of the three footpaths that joined Hooton’s Back Lane with the Iron Age route of Lound Lane) was so-called not simply because it was the haunt of meles meles, but because it was the only place within the parish where itinerant pedlars (‘Badgers’) had rights to graze their horses. But Badger Balk was much more than that. It was also part of a luminous and numinous personal landscape. Where it terminated at Four-Lane-Ends, the ivied elders were clotted with the ragged nests of spuggies, and foxes earthed under field stone dumped in the broad hedge-bottoms. Immediately beyond was Deep Dale, until recently an isolated valley too steep too plough, an oasis of orchids and harebells in an agrochemical waste. Richard Rolle, the hermit of nearby Hampole and confessor to the nuns at its Cistercian Priory, had his ‘shack in the fields’ very near here — the place where lazerlight lamps strafe the midnight stubbles in search of loping Puss and where Robert Aske’s forty thousand marched past bannered under Wounds, en-route to their great camp at Scawsby.
All my landscapes are transformed into quasi-sacred landscapes by a mythopoeic coalescence of experience, reading and imagination. The sacred landscape of Brierley Common, between South Kirkby, Brierley, Hemsworth, Grimethorpe and Great Houghton informs much of Englaland. Richard Rolle’s Hampole underpins my current work-in-progress, Incendium Amoris. Almost every day I walk my dogs down ‘the lines’ (the disused railway lines) near where I live in Upton. But I’m not just walking ‘the lines’. Almost every stride is resonant with historical, personal or other significance. The place where I cross the road to join the path is where, in 1973, nine-year-old Colin Bryant was killed by a car whilst playing ‘chicken’ on the highway. Across the road, behind the old station master’s house, a tawny owl nests in a magpie’s abandoned drey. A looted brick platform is all that remains of the station, formerly a halt on the Hull to Barnsley line which fell to Beeching’s axe in the railway-killing sixties.
Walking on, I pass the scrubby, sparrowhawk-patrolled woodland from which jays and little owls call and where, for one unbelievable weekend last May, a nightingale hymned in the dusk. It was in that wood, in 1981, that I stumbled across a turtle dove’s nest — the last nest I ever found of that species, now extinct in the North. A hundred yards further and the path spurs off to North Elmsall, where in the seventies a seal of Pope Honorius III was turned from the tilth and where the highwayman John Nevison would hold court in the White Hart, a now-vanished coaching inn on the Wakefield-London road. Past a patch of wild raspberry is the site of the short-lived Upton Colliery, opened in the thirties and closed by the sixties, now re-shaped into Upton Country Park, where cuckoos chase and call each spring. The fishing pond, margined in loosestrife, phragmites and flag, is fed by the spring known as Thunder Hole, which roars from the scrub below Luke Farmer’s memorial garden. Luke was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, aged 19. I used to go out with his Dad’s cousin. Along the cutting, where lads in Jack Pyke send ferrets into setts that travel deep into the fissured limestone, is the hamlet of Wrangbrook, until the sixties the site of an important railway junction where three now defunct rail-lines met. There kids converge to shake down conkers, last year I gathered a stone of blackberries, and sometime in the late fourteenth century, a paralytic got up and walked after praying to Saint Richard. Beyond is Skelbrooke, where John Little is graved interred in the Archangel’s graveyard, a few hundred yards below Robin Hood’s Well. This land lives and its dead cannot die. It’s as wrong to build a bypass or a Tesco on this land as it is to kill a tiger to grind into Chinese Viagra.
SHEENAGH: I can see why you say that, but could it not be said that while tigers are finite, land goes on for ever, and what you're proposing there is to freeze its ongoing history, of which you're so conscious in the poems, at one arbitrary point? Saxons recycled Roman walls, mediaeval farmers re-used once-sacred stones as barn floors. The sacredness and history of this particular land is obvious to you because you know it, but in all probability there's hardly a square yard of the country of which the same couldn't be said by someone who knew it well, and we can hardly ban building everywhere.... Since I spend much of my life regretting that I didn't become an archaeologist, my own inclination is to preserve everything, but doesn't that, in itself, go against the concept of landscape as a living organism, which is never done changing and developing?
STEVE: What I’m against is total or careless destruction for no good reason. As far as I can see there is never a good reason to build a Tesco or a bypass. My local authority put a new bypass (‘link- road’) near Upton a few years ago, using European money. The same local authority had rejected spending its own money on the same road twenty years previously because the cost of the road ‘was not justified by the usual standards of highway economics’. That is, it wasn’t necessary. The avowed reason for the road was to complete the A1-M1 link road (to open up land for development) and more specifically open up the former pit site of South Kirkby Colliery for development (even though it already had excellent road access). I protested against the plans and proposals both times. The road has bisected the largest swathe of open, undeveloped farmland in the local area, soaked the countryside in traffic roar, taken out some woodland, cut across the route of several footpaths and has brought anti-social behaviour into the countryside (joy-riding, destruction of paths, fields and hedges by off-roaders). On the plus side, HGVs can get from the A1 to the M1 three minutes faster than hitherto and the Colliery site now has a back door as well as a front door. As long as our political leaders are committed to growth (economic and population; the two come together, by definition), development never stops and the land is continually subject to creeping industrialisation and suburbanisation. (I recently saw a photograph of the land between South Elmsall and Upton (where I live) dating from about 1955. There was about a mile and a half of clear space — woodland, pasture, arable. Sixty years later, the gap is about three hundred yards). It’s not about opposing change and development, but learning to value what we have, becoming conscious of landscape, nature, and ‘heritage’, and subjecting development to local, democratic control. Ultimately, we need to reduce the population, end sprawl and restore the land.
SHEENAGH: You're very unafraid of words. That sounds an odd thing to say of a poet, but I've read so many reviewers, in particular, who seem downright terrified of any vocabulary vaguely out of the ordinary. Use an esoteric or archaic word and they'll complain of elitism; use modern slang and it's condemned as unsuitable or a "duff note", as if modern argot and poetry were somehow incompatible. One of the things I like best about your work is how you cheerfully expect your readers to cope with liturgical language, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, umpteen bird and plant names, lovely obscure words like xanthic for yellow, and you mix that in with army slang, business jargon, politician's soundbites….
STEVE: Words are my business, and as such, every word, in every language — past, present and future — belongs to me. I’ll use them as I see fit. Relatively early in my poetic second-coming I was expressly warned-off from using the word ‘cerulean’ by a well-meaning would-be mentor. My response was to write a poem (‘fancy THAT’, from my unpublished book, the compleat eater) that deliberately and provocatively deployed the word. Since I began to write again in 2003, I’ve used a range of registers, vocabularies and languages — Yorkshire dialect, the cant of U.S. prison gangs, Calo (the Hispanic ‘creole’ of East Los Angeles) , and many more, including the examples you cite. In ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ (Englaland) I also use two Romani words, ‘sunakai’ and ‘salno’, which both connote ‘yellow’. In the stanza of the same poem in which I use the word ‘xanthic’ there are five other evocations of ‘yellow’. I’m trying to make it golden.
SHEENAGH: Indeed yes. It felt to me as if what you were doing in Song of the Yellowhammer was trying to wrap the landscape in a sort of golden haze. In metaphorical terms that isn't a million miles from a sepia wash, and I did wonder if you ever worried about attracting the criticism George Mackay Brown sometimes encountered, namely that he over-idealised the past of his chosen landscape? Especially since, near the end, in the verse beginning "Cut the vines", you seem to hint, albeit less apocalyptically, at something akin to what he says in his essay on Rackwick: "I do not think Rackwick will remain empty for ever. It could happen that the atom-and-planet horror at the heart of our civilisation will scatter people again to the quiet beautiful fertile places of the world". Which alarmed me at the time, because he sounded as if he thought a nuclear holocaust would be a small price to pay for such an outcome... In your poem, the lines
STEVE: The gold is the gold of the yellowhammer, a symbol for ‘the people in the land’, the real treasure, not the lucre zealously guarded by Fafnir or sought by Sigurdr. Also in my use of ‘goldenness imagery’ I intended to give luminosity to the landscape itself, which is the other treasure — and perhaps to knowingly evoke an imagined, past-and-perhaps-once-again, ‘golden age’. I think the juxtapositions with violent and quotidian elements and the poem’s engagement, argument and tension guards against any simpering to sepia. My own, more cowardly version of Mackay Brown’s sentiment is summarised later in the poem. ‘Too much blood, I can’t commit.’ I’m intuiting and assuming that the wrenching away from capitalism necessary for sustainable living, conservation, the full development of human potential and social justice will lead to upheaval and slaughter as the rich and powerful choose to scorch the Earth and immolate its peoples rather than concede their dominance. That fact that I ‘can’t commit’ makes my anarcho-yeoman utopianism a prophetic, not political vision. However, I do think yeoman-anarchism is a possible future (perhaps the only sustainable one). Those with the means to downsize, go off-grid and opt-out are approximating to a fragile, individualised and ultimately unsustainable version of it right now. On a wider, societal level, some form of revolution would be necessary. What kind and where it might come from I have no idea. But the alternative is the totalitarianism of plutocracy and the commoditisation of everything: death for the sake of profit.
SHEENAGH: How did your language become so rich and multi-layered, and have you ever had trouble getting it past editors?
STEVE: At one level, the reason why I deploy such a wide range of registers and lexicons is because I have a wide range of interests and obsessions — football, birding, hunting, nature, history, England, the Bible, religion, Catholicism, the occult, crime, the Fen, radical and revolutionary politics and so on — and the content, vocabulary and mode of expression characteristic to each area all find their way into my work. However, behind both Oswald’s Book of Hours and Englaland is a vision of England in which fifteen hundred years of history, culture and language exist simultaneously as an irreducible synoptic unity; my ‘interests and obsessions’ are filtered through this vision, producing the diversity of language, forms and range of reference that characterises both books. Ultimately, the heteroglossic mode of Oswald & Englaland is as much a product of ideology as accident or aesthetics.
I’ve often suspected that the relative unorthodoxy of my work has alienated the more provincial (Kavanagh’s usage) editors but I don’t really know this for sure. My editor at Smokestack Books, Andy Croft, has said that ‘only Smokestack’ would have published Oswald’s Book of Hours, and he might be right.
SHEENAGH: "Since I began to write again in 2003" – yes, I gathered from your website that you'd taken a break from writing and then come back to it. What made that happen, and if you actually stopped writing altogether, how else did you express the thoughts and concerns that feel so urgent in your recent work?
STEVE: I stopped writing when I went to University in 1988. I’d been writing poetry for five or six years and had reached a decent standard and had begun to think of myself as a ‘good’ poet. I think the energy I’d hitherto been putting into writing simply went into my studies. I also became very active in the Green Party about that time, so that might also have played a role in sucking up my time. In 1992 I left the Greens, joined the Socialist Workers Party — and became a secondary school teacher. My creativity was channelled into pedagogy and selling papers on the street. In the mid-1990s I began to read a lot of true crime and crime fiction. I made two abortive attempts to write thrillers. But in the period 1988-2003 I didn’t write any poetry at all — and barely read any. I left the SWP in 1996 and became politically quiescent. I’ve remained so to this day. (I don’t count simply ‘having opinions’, even on social media (or in poems), as being politically engaged — you’ve got to join, campaign, organise, commit, sacrifice.) I don’t think I expressed myself at all creatively during that period. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so prolific since starting up again. I’ve got years of stored-up unconscious to download.
SHEENAGH: Glad to hear it! Your poems don't shy away from politics or indeed polemic. I know you feel the past is always in the present anyway, but do you use historical parallels to get some distance from the subject, to approach it from an angle rather than head-on?
STEVE: Not consciously, although I do affirm the past to critique the present. I’ve just written a Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin. The play addresses modern themes: it’s an affirmation and exploration of the irrational in the context of the ‘New Atheism’s’ scorched earth kulturkampf against ‘religion’. However, it’s set in first century A.D. Palestine and written in an approximation to an early sixteenth century style — alliterative blank verse — which I suppose is a political choice in itself.
Having said that, I rarely set out to write a ‘political poem’; however, because my poetry is engaged (that is it proceeds from vision and position) there is often a political (or at least public) dimension to it. My poem ‘Spearhafoc’, for example, began as an attempt to evoke the spirit of the sparrowhawk (in response to a particularly striking photograph of the bird), but as it stands is largely a defiant affirmation of a specific kind of working-class outlawry; I didn’t intend that. It’s just that the network of associations sparked off by ‘sparrowhawk’ include the Book of St. Albans, A Kestrel for a Knave, Kes, trespass, poaching, egg collecting, eyass ‘scrumping’ and the violence and confrontations which are inevitably associated with and follow from those things. In some sections of Englaland’s ‘Mongrel Blood Imperium’, I consciously adopted a less ‘poetic’, more direct and contemporary voice in order to present arguments, expose the faltering in my process and to convey uncertainty and bewilderment (and also to give some relief from the intensity and pace that otherwise characterised that 200 page poem. Overall, I think the decision was the right one. However, the shift to a more direct register, motivated by political as much as aesthetic considerations, came at the cost of music and a dilution of the linguistic resource. A more oblique approach gives greater space in which the imagination can roam and provides a greater range of resources to appropriate.
SHEENAGH: You use a lot of different forms – offhand I can think of ballads, unrhymed sonnets, alliterative verse, prose-poems in various formats. How does a poem, or a sequence of poems, find its ideal form, the one that feels right to you?
STEVE: I generally plan what I’m going to do, taking into account theme, content, language, intention, etc. Oswald’s Book of Hours was modelled on the structure of a mediaeval Book of Hours, which generally open with a Calendar (of Holy Days, etc), proceed via a formalised sequence of prayers and Psalms and conclude with ‘Memorials to the Saints’. Having settled on this general structure, I then proceeded on a utilitarian, practical basis (one of my major aims was simply to prevent the book becoming too long), hence the large number of short, sonnet-like poems — deciding to write a sonnet is my way of telling myself to keep it brief. My unpublished collection, the compleat eater was conceived of partially as a provocative comment on form — it’s written in unpunctuated and justified columns of lower case text and defines itself as poetry via rhythm, compression and lexis. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ is an improvised form, its nine line stanzas, with the last line being much longer than the rest, is being a stylisation of the traditional rendering of the nine-syllable song of the yellowhammer — ‘a little bit of bread and no cheeeeeese’.
However, although I am and will always be a planner, I’m increasingly giving myself flexibility within the broad outline of any given plan. My work-in-progress Incendium Amoris is planned and structured and has movement and direction. However, within the broad intention, I’m giving myself considerable heuristic freedom in executing the various poems. I haven’t always done this; I haven’t always thought it necessary to. Oswald’s Book of Hours for example, was planned poem-by-poem, in great detail. I stuck to the plan throughout, with very few departures. ‘Werewolf’, my just-completed pamphlet-length sequence, was similarly very tightly planned and has a quite intricate organisational structure. However, the general trend in my work is for looser planning and greater spontaneity. Having said that, I’m increasingly interested in identifying forms that might complement my ‘English idiom’ and to that end I’ve begun to explore and experiment. I’m becoming particularly interested in ballad forms, odes, sprung rhythm, the Arabic qasida (I’ve just written an alliterative poem based on an Old English charm in a qasida-derived form) and in techniques (parallelism, repetition, lexical economy) used in the various English Bibles.
SHEENAGH: Yes, while Oswald's Book of Hours actually was laid out like a mediaeval book of devotions, Englaland was far looser and longer, and I know its published form wasn't, for space reasons, quite what you had planned, but what sort of a shape did you see it as being?
STEVE: Englaland was conceived of (in 2009, when I started writing it) as the thing it became, a wide-ranging epic that affirms, uncovers, critiques and transforms ideas of England and Englishness. The intention was to create a number of pamphlet-length sequences or long poems that could stand alone, but that would also be in thematic and other relation to each other, mutually commenting on, reinforcing and illuminating and thus creating a unity in which the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. Englaland was planned and structured quite carefully from the beginning, although it did develop. Oswald’s Book of Hours, for example was originally planned to be a section of Englaland, but it grew too long for the piece. ‘Big Billy’ was originally the centre-piece of a five poem alliterative sequence (‘Feast’) about the Good Friday fair at Brierley Common, but it grew to dominate the other poems (in terms of length) so much that I discarded the others. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ was a relatively late addition to the plan and ‘The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ had to be sacrificed at the proof stage due to reasons of space — which grieved me no end, because all the component parts of the book are integral. If there is ever a reprint, I’d like to reincorporate ‘Scouse’, although that will probably add another fifteen or twenty pages to the book.
SHEENAGH: Both your collections have been very male worlds. In Oswald's Book of Hours, the only females I recall being spoken of with affection or respect were the Virgin Mary and various lurchers, and in fact there were several references to women that could be seen as casually misogynist, which was fair enough since they were in the voice of Nevison, who could hardly speak like a New Man. There was one in Englaland that bothered me a bit more, because though it was in a ballad about Nevison, it was in a narrator's voice: "he robbed the rich, man and bitch". If that had been, say, "cur and bitch", it'd be just the natural resentment of the poor against the rich. But it uses a neutral word for the male victim and a loaded, pejorative one for the female. What's the rationale there? And do you see your poetry continuing to be so male-dominated?
STEVE: Quite a few people have commented on the male world of these two books and gently implied that there may be misogyny at work. I’ve just had a quick trawl through Oswald’s Book of Hours and noted (in addition to Our Lady and the various female lurchers and long dogs) ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to Mary Tudor & Elizabeth Barton (‘Obsecro te’ & ‘O intemerata’), the un-named Flemish girl in ‘Beati, quorum remissae’, my daughter in the first poem of ‘Hours of the Dead’, Mary Magdalen in the poem of that name in ‘Memorials of the Saints’ and Margaret of Kirkeby in ‘Richard Rolle’. A similar trawl through Englaland reveals ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to ‘a girl’ in poem ‘X’ of ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’; ‘domestics and milkmaids’ in poem ‘XXI’; there are ‘affectionate’ if not ‘respectful’ references to women (and men) in ‘Eight Miles Out’; Lady Julia Warde-Aldam turns up in ‘Reverend John Harnett Jennings'; there are incidental but ‘respectful’ references to women in ‘The Field Church, Frickley’; ‘the booze-loosened lasses’ of ‘Big Billy’ are portrayed ‘affectionately’ and, I think ‘respectfully’; ‘Krakumal’ is Ragnar’s death-bed paean to his wife, Aslaug (Kraka); several women are mentioned in ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ and ‘Mrs Duffy’ gets a poem to herself. So maybe there are more ‘positive’ or at least ‘neutral’ references to women than you think.
The specific reference you make to possible casual misogyny (in ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’), in which the narrator uses the term ‘bitch’ in lieu of ‘woman’, may actually be compounded by his subsequent reference to the innkeeper’s adulterous wife as a ‘whore’. However, the narrator of ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’ is a working-class raconteur of a certain type, an outlaw and provocateur himself , hymning his hero’s deviance in a deliberately scandalous way, variously praising his hero’s fecklessness, his penchant for armed robbery and running protection rackets, his contempt for the rich, his treachery, womanising and reckless cunning. The poem ends with the narrator himself threatening the audience. The narrator’s possible misogyny is part of a range of disreputable attitudes he owns.
Of course, at a more basic level, I needed a rhyme for ‘rich’ and ‘bitch’ fitted the bill. I’m not sure my narrator would’ve used ‘cur’, though; ‘cur’ is not really in the vernacular as a synonym for ‘man’ the same way that ‘bitch’ (however much you might deplore it) is for ‘woman’. A few years ago I got into a similar minor controversy with some fellow writers over the use of racist terms by one of my narrators and some of my characters in my unpublished (the various poems were published in magazines and journals) book, JerUSAlem. One of the major themes of JerUSAlem is race and racism in the context of the ‘American Dream’ and concepts of the USA as ‘promised land’. Some of my characters and narrators were racists of various stripes and this was reflected in their language. I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem.
However, to return to your fundamental point, both collections are undoubtedly very male worlds. Why is my world a male world? I suppose the content and themes of Oswald and Englaland — warfare, fighting, hunting, poaching, outlawry, revolution and so on — are bound to import a male bias. Plus, I am a man. I suppose I write about manly things. Looking at my most recent work: Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God is ‘very male’; given that its subject is violence, war, terrorism and genocide, it was always likely to be. Incendium Amoris is essentially ‘about love’, and as such is more balanced, genderwise. Enganche is about football. Ten poems in, it’s a very male world indeed. It’s just the way it is. I would never consciously attempt to compensate. I don’t write to be representative. I write because I’m obsessive-compulsive.
SHEENAGH: "I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem." No indeed, and I wish to heaven that more readers would see the difference between narrative and character voice. As Chaucer says,
Having said that, of course the sly old soul knew very well that it was he, the author, who chose his narrators and their tones and attitudes. I suppose it's the tone of some of your narrators' comments on women, rather than what they actually say, that sticks in the mind. Admittedly there's room for different interpretations: for instance "big-bosomed" could be glossed as "maternal" or "nurturing" rather than "belongs on Page 3", while "booze-loosened lasses" maybe sounds affectionate in a male ear but contemptuous in a female one? But what I'm really getting at is the clear, unconditional love that shows in the voices of your male narrators when they talk of their dogs, and which I don't hear elsewhere. It reminds me of when R S Thomas, in his autobiography, speaks of goldcrests: "I dote on them, the pretty little things". This comes as a terrific surprise, because he never says anything half so affectionate about his own wife and son (whose conception is explained in the sentence "The vicar's wife had expressed a desire for a child"). I don't suppose that means he didn't have feelings for them but he seems to have saved all his own expressiveness for the goldcrests. Hey, maybe I've been coming at this from the wrong angle; is it that your male narrators, too, feel less embarrassed expressing sentiments for animals?
STEVE: ‘Big-bosomed’ alludes to the comment Richard Rolle made to Margaret of Kirkeby during one of their conversations — that she had ‘gret papys’. She was a nun, he her spiritual advisor and confessor, which set certain boundaries. However, within that context, their relationship was loving and passionate and reading-between-the-lines, charged with sexual tension. ‘Booze-loosened lasses’ needs to be understood in the context of the drunken, tongue-in-cheek, sexual banter envisaged. Think hen party-meets-stag do at the races. ‘Lads laughing and lathered, lurching and leering’ at the ‘flirty, fresh faced fillies’ who ‘bar-barge’ Big Billy, ‘pouting promises for paid on porter’ — which may or may not be honoured. Maybe it’s a class thing; or maybe I’m a sly old soul myself. I think is easier for many people (not just men) to profess unconditional love to those utterly dependent and inarticulate (animals, babies) because those objects can’t muddy the emotional waters by articulating a reciprocal love (or rejection, even) — which is by definition a demand, a contract, a constraint. I suppose loving animals is in some respects an expression of solipsism or narcissism. Loving animals could also be an expression of alienation — maybe my working class narrators love their dogs because they come alive when working them in a way they simply can’t in their constrained quotidian — work, responsibility, debt, domesticity. The running dog is an emblem of freedom and escape — and a means of catharsis. Alternatively, perhaps I’m just sick of poems about ‘feelings’.
SHEENAGH: And while we're on the subject, do you have any theories as to why so many male poets are also birders? I can think of half a dozen male poets I know or know of, who are keen birdwatchers, and not a single female poet. If it weren't for that gender difference, one could formulate some high-flown (ha!) theory about flying being the ultimate escapism and poetry being another form of it, but it won't work for one sex only.
STEVE: It’s true — David Morley, Gregory Leadbetter, and Gerry Cambridge come to mind straight away. Pat explanation of why many men are birdwatchers and many male birdwatchers are poets: the alleged male hunting instinct sublimated to ‘capturing’ and ‘possession’ via the technical skills of identification, knowledge of habitat, etc fieldcraft, identification and classification. Birding poets effect a secondary sublimation: as opposed to being twitched, listed or sketched in the Alwych, the birds are written about, or otherwise incorporated in poems. I don’t list (except on my annual spring trip to Uist), but I frequently boast that 46 species of bird are named in Oswald’s Book of Hours. It’s the Hughes thing from Poetry in the Making — writing a poem is like ‘capturing animals’. Having said all that, I cheerfully concede that it might well be trite rubbish. Bird-watching and writing poetry is what you do when you escape for the world, even to engage with it. They’re both expressions of alienation and exile, a prophetic separation; Elijah in the wilderness being fed by ravens, in refuge from persecution, earthquake and fire, finding his still, small voice.
SHEENAGH: What do you plan to do next? There was a playlet in Englaland, plus a sort of mini-epic in alliterative verse; are you drawn to do more in those genres?
STEVE: I’ve just about finished two books of poetry. Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God explores the human capacity for extremism and violence. The aforementioned ‘Werewolf’ and The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ have found homes in this book, along with my narrative sonnet-sequence ‘True Crime’ and my Poetry Society commission ‘How Dear is Life’. Incendium Amoris is a collection of poems arising from the life, writings and landscapes of the fourteenth century mystic Richard Rolle. I’ve recently written a Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin which explores issues of rationality/irrationality and is a subtle and insightful contribution to the otherwise crass sloganeering of the ‘Religion vs Science’ debate. I’ve started work on a collection ‘about football’, provisionally entitled Enganche. I’ve got ideas for tracts, pamphlets and plays set in the revolutionary tumults of the seventeenth and fourteenth centuries and I have two abandoned novels I’d like to revive.
SHEENAGH: I utterly love the idea of tracts and pamphlets! If I could have lived in a former age (not that I would want to, and nor would George Mackay Brown if he'd had to cook on an open fire instead of grumbling about the decadence of stoves) I would choose the Commonwealth times when there was such an explosion of printed material, when the Welsh tailor Arise Evans could become a noted author of religious books and women could preach. What era do you think would have suited you best, and what would have been your fate in it?
STEVE: I love the ferment of the English revolution and its literary expression — Winstanley, Coppe, Tyranipocrit Uncovered, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers, although my favourite poem of that period is the fierce music of the fifty-nine signatures listed on Charles Stewart’s death warrant. Me and Alice Oswald. It’s a pity literacy in our language wasn’t sufficiently developed in 1381 to leave more evidence about the Peasant’s Revolt, although, ‘whan Adam delved and Eve spanne, who then was the gentilman?’, is fine poetry and as clear a piece of class analysis as you could wish for. Some of John Ball’s communications have survived, including the following, which I incorporated in my poem ‘John Ball’, (from Oswald’s Book of Hours):
There were no Lords in Eden’s commune. But if I had to choose a period to transport myself to it would have been the period immediately post 1066. I’d have joined what the historian Peter Rex has called ‘The English Resistance’ against Guillaume the Bastard’s genocidal asset-stripping of England and the North in particular. I would have chopped a few Frenchmen before being disembowelled and hung from a gibbet by my thumbs. Stoves aren’t decadent. They’re necessary. Stove PLC is the problem. It denies stoves at all to those who can’t pay and puts the Amazon through a wood chipper to build super-deluxe diamond-encrusted platinum stoves for Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich.
More poems and links
The Song of the Yellowhammer from Englaland can be found here.
Smokestack Books, Steve Ely's publisher
Steve Ely's website
Matins: Annunciation
Force eight from Lundy and the Irish Sea
in the dark moon of the solstice.
Alarmed awake at midnight, sleet slashing
across the window glass, blurring the street-lit world.
Packing the van in drenched Jack Pyke:
Lazerlight lamp-kit, slip-leads, dogs.
The long drive east to the ditch-cut flatlands.
Sleet strafing down. Wind howling in the hawthorns.
Shivering long-dogs, ears erect. The thousand foot
halogen beam. Green eyes in hedge-bottoms.
Transfixed conies. Dogs running down the beam.
Conies dangling in the Deben double V.
Back to the van. Bag the necked and bladdered conies.
Towel and box the dogs. Peel off the drenched Jack Pyke.
The cold drive home in the dark moon of the solstice,
sleet slurring the view through the wiping-windscreen,
blurring the headlamped world.
(From Oswald's Book of Hours)
SHEENAGH: Your work is clearly very rooted in a particular landscape, and every point in that landscape's history seems equally present to you – there aren't many ways in which you remind me of Cavafy, but one resemblance I do see is how people like Oswald of Northumbria and Nevison the highwayman are still alive in your mental and emotional territory, just as Cavafy evidently wouldn't have been surprised to turn a corner in Alexandria and bump into Mark Antony or a priest from the Serapeion. How long has this sense of past-in-present been with you, and informing your work?
STEVE: The sense of past-in-present, as you put it, has been with me for as long as I can remember. As a kid I’d attempt to imagine the layerings of the past that had shaped the various aspects of the landscapes I roamed in — how the fields and woods became, the backstories of footpaths, copses, ponds and valleys. This tendency became more intense and urgent in my teens as reading began to inform and transform my experiences of place — and as my experiences of place began to similarly inform and transform my reading. That dialectic enabled the development of an imagined historical perspective that contextualised and sacralised that which had hitherto been quotidian — particular trees, meadows, views — or whole topographies. As this tendency developed, I came to see landscape as something akin to a living organism embodying a transgenerational integrity in which the past was inexorably alive in the present.
Two books were particularly important in this development. The first was Aaron Wilkinson’s A History of South Kirkby. (South Kirkby is the place I was brought up in. I’ve spend most of my life in the area.) I first read the book aged around fifteen and it sent me rambling around my local area (and into my local libraries as I followed up Wilkinson’s bibliography) with fresh eyes, triangulating landscape with past people and events and enabling me to connect my parish with a larger history (the Danelaw, the Norman Conquest, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Wars of the Roses, enclosure and the English & Industrial Revolutions).
Arthur Ruston & Denis Witney’s Hooton Pagnell: The Evolution of a Yorkshire Village (1934), also became important to my sense of the present in the past. The Hooton Pagnell estate was the main poaching/bird-nesting territories territory of my youth. I knew every hawthorn bush and rat-hole of that estate. I didn’t encounter Ruston and Witney until I was well into my twenties, but the millennial scope of the book provided an account of the landscape that allowed me to see my personal experiences in and around the village (and the neighbouring Frickley Estate) as part of a continuous parade of human activity from the Yorkshire Danes Swein and Arketil, to the planting of Frickley pit. I discovered, for example, that ‘Badger Balk’, (the widest of the three footpaths that joined Hooton’s Back Lane with the Iron Age route of Lound Lane) was so-called not simply because it was the haunt of meles meles, but because it was the only place within the parish where itinerant pedlars (‘Badgers’) had rights to graze their horses. But Badger Balk was much more than that. It was also part of a luminous and numinous personal landscape. Where it terminated at Four-Lane-Ends, the ivied elders were clotted with the ragged nests of spuggies, and foxes earthed under field stone dumped in the broad hedge-bottoms. Immediately beyond was Deep Dale, until recently an isolated valley too steep too plough, an oasis of orchids and harebells in an agrochemical waste. Richard Rolle, the hermit of nearby Hampole and confessor to the nuns at its Cistercian Priory, had his ‘shack in the fields’ very near here — the place where lazerlight lamps strafe the midnight stubbles in search of loping Puss and where Robert Aske’s forty thousand marched past bannered under Wounds, en-route to their great camp at Scawsby.
All my landscapes are transformed into quasi-sacred landscapes by a mythopoeic coalescence of experience, reading and imagination. The sacred landscape of Brierley Common, between South Kirkby, Brierley, Hemsworth, Grimethorpe and Great Houghton informs much of Englaland. Richard Rolle’s Hampole underpins my current work-in-progress, Incendium Amoris. Almost every day I walk my dogs down ‘the lines’ (the disused railway lines) near where I live in Upton. But I’m not just walking ‘the lines’. Almost every stride is resonant with historical, personal or other significance. The place where I cross the road to join the path is where, in 1973, nine-year-old Colin Bryant was killed by a car whilst playing ‘chicken’ on the highway. Across the road, behind the old station master’s house, a tawny owl nests in a magpie’s abandoned drey. A looted brick platform is all that remains of the station, formerly a halt on the Hull to Barnsley line which fell to Beeching’s axe in the railway-killing sixties.
Walking on, I pass the scrubby, sparrowhawk-patrolled woodland from which jays and little owls call and where, for one unbelievable weekend last May, a nightingale hymned in the dusk. It was in that wood, in 1981, that I stumbled across a turtle dove’s nest — the last nest I ever found of that species, now extinct in the North. A hundred yards further and the path spurs off to North Elmsall, where in the seventies a seal of Pope Honorius III was turned from the tilth and where the highwayman John Nevison would hold court in the White Hart, a now-vanished coaching inn on the Wakefield-London road. Past a patch of wild raspberry is the site of the short-lived Upton Colliery, opened in the thirties and closed by the sixties, now re-shaped into Upton Country Park, where cuckoos chase and call each spring. The fishing pond, margined in loosestrife, phragmites and flag, is fed by the spring known as Thunder Hole, which roars from the scrub below Luke Farmer’s memorial garden. Luke was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, aged 19. I used to go out with his Dad’s cousin. Along the cutting, where lads in Jack Pyke send ferrets into setts that travel deep into the fissured limestone, is the hamlet of Wrangbrook, until the sixties the site of an important railway junction where three now defunct rail-lines met. There kids converge to shake down conkers, last year I gathered a stone of blackberries, and sometime in the late fourteenth century, a paralytic got up and walked after praying to Saint Richard. Beyond is Skelbrooke, where John Little is graved interred in the Archangel’s graveyard, a few hundred yards below Robin Hood’s Well. This land lives and its dead cannot die. It’s as wrong to build a bypass or a Tesco on this land as it is to kill a tiger to grind into Chinese Viagra.
SHEENAGH: I can see why you say that, but could it not be said that while tigers are finite, land goes on for ever, and what you're proposing there is to freeze its ongoing history, of which you're so conscious in the poems, at one arbitrary point? Saxons recycled Roman walls, mediaeval farmers re-used once-sacred stones as barn floors. The sacredness and history of this particular land is obvious to you because you know it, but in all probability there's hardly a square yard of the country of which the same couldn't be said by someone who knew it well, and we can hardly ban building everywhere.... Since I spend much of my life regretting that I didn't become an archaeologist, my own inclination is to preserve everything, but doesn't that, in itself, go against the concept of landscape as a living organism, which is never done changing and developing?
STEVE: What I’m against is total or careless destruction for no good reason. As far as I can see there is never a good reason to build a Tesco or a bypass. My local authority put a new bypass (‘link- road’) near Upton a few years ago, using European money. The same local authority had rejected spending its own money on the same road twenty years previously because the cost of the road ‘was not justified by the usual standards of highway economics’. That is, it wasn’t necessary. The avowed reason for the road was to complete the A1-M1 link road (to open up land for development) and more specifically open up the former pit site of South Kirkby Colliery for development (even though it already had excellent road access). I protested against the plans and proposals both times. The road has bisected the largest swathe of open, undeveloped farmland in the local area, soaked the countryside in traffic roar, taken out some woodland, cut across the route of several footpaths and has brought anti-social behaviour into the countryside (joy-riding, destruction of paths, fields and hedges by off-roaders). On the plus side, HGVs can get from the A1 to the M1 three minutes faster than hitherto and the Colliery site now has a back door as well as a front door. As long as our political leaders are committed to growth (economic and population; the two come together, by definition), development never stops and the land is continually subject to creeping industrialisation and suburbanisation. (I recently saw a photograph of the land between South Elmsall and Upton (where I live) dating from about 1955. There was about a mile and a half of clear space — woodland, pasture, arable. Sixty years later, the gap is about three hundred yards). It’s not about opposing change and development, but learning to value what we have, becoming conscious of landscape, nature, and ‘heritage’, and subjecting development to local, democratic control. Ultimately, we need to reduce the population, end sprawl and restore the land.
SHEENAGH: You're very unafraid of words. That sounds an odd thing to say of a poet, but I've read so many reviewers, in particular, who seem downright terrified of any vocabulary vaguely out of the ordinary. Use an esoteric or archaic word and they'll complain of elitism; use modern slang and it's condemned as unsuitable or a "duff note", as if modern argot and poetry were somehow incompatible. One of the things I like best about your work is how you cheerfully expect your readers to cope with liturgical language, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, umpteen bird and plant names, lovely obscure words like xanthic for yellow, and you mix that in with army slang, business jargon, politician's soundbites….
STEVE: Words are my business, and as such, every word, in every language — past, present and future — belongs to me. I’ll use them as I see fit. Relatively early in my poetic second-coming I was expressly warned-off from using the word ‘cerulean’ by a well-meaning would-be mentor. My response was to write a poem (‘fancy THAT’, from my unpublished book, the compleat eater) that deliberately and provocatively deployed the word. Since I began to write again in 2003, I’ve used a range of registers, vocabularies and languages — Yorkshire dialect, the cant of U.S. prison gangs, Calo (the Hispanic ‘creole’ of East Los Angeles) , and many more, including the examples you cite. In ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ (Englaland) I also use two Romani words, ‘sunakai’ and ‘salno’, which both connote ‘yellow’. In the stanza of the same poem in which I use the word ‘xanthic’ there are five other evocations of ‘yellow’. I’m trying to make it golden.
SHEENAGH: Indeed yes. It felt to me as if what you were doing in Song of the Yellowhammer was trying to wrap the landscape in a sort of golden haze. In metaphorical terms that isn't a million miles from a sepia wash, and I did wonder if you ever worried about attracting the criticism George Mackay Brown sometimes encountered, namely that he over-idealised the past of his chosen landscape? Especially since, near the end, in the verse beginning "Cut the vines", you seem to hint, albeit less apocalyptically, at something akin to what he says in his essay on Rackwick: "I do not think Rackwick will remain empty for ever. It could happen that the atom-and-planet horror at the heart of our civilisation will scatter people again to the quiet beautiful fertile places of the world". Which alarmed me at the time, because he sounded as if he thought a nuclear holocaust would be a small price to pay for such an outcome... In your poem, the lines
To each man his allotment.sounded more elegiac, like a dream of what had once been but you knew could never actually happen again (certainly not if the average digging and building skills of the population are anything like mine). Leastways, that was how I read that poem; was I right to, or were you seeing not just a desired but a possible future?
With plough-turned fieldstone
gentled hands will build
once more, and lift the lintels of long-tumbled halls
STEVE: The gold is the gold of the yellowhammer, a symbol for ‘the people in the land’, the real treasure, not the lucre zealously guarded by Fafnir or sought by Sigurdr. Also in my use of ‘goldenness imagery’ I intended to give luminosity to the landscape itself, which is the other treasure — and perhaps to knowingly evoke an imagined, past-and-perhaps-once-again, ‘golden age’. I think the juxtapositions with violent and quotidian elements and the poem’s engagement, argument and tension guards against any simpering to sepia. My own, more cowardly version of Mackay Brown’s sentiment is summarised later in the poem. ‘Too much blood, I can’t commit.’ I’m intuiting and assuming that the wrenching away from capitalism necessary for sustainable living, conservation, the full development of human potential and social justice will lead to upheaval and slaughter as the rich and powerful choose to scorch the Earth and immolate its peoples rather than concede their dominance. That fact that I ‘can’t commit’ makes my anarcho-yeoman utopianism a prophetic, not political vision. However, I do think yeoman-anarchism is a possible future (perhaps the only sustainable one). Those with the means to downsize, go off-grid and opt-out are approximating to a fragile, individualised and ultimately unsustainable version of it right now. On a wider, societal level, some form of revolution would be necessary. What kind and where it might come from I have no idea. But the alternative is the totalitarianism of plutocracy and the commoditisation of everything: death for the sake of profit.
SHEENAGH: How did your language become so rich and multi-layered, and have you ever had trouble getting it past editors?
STEVE: At one level, the reason why I deploy such a wide range of registers and lexicons is because I have a wide range of interests and obsessions — football, birding, hunting, nature, history, England, the Bible, religion, Catholicism, the occult, crime, the Fen, radical and revolutionary politics and so on — and the content, vocabulary and mode of expression characteristic to each area all find their way into my work. However, behind both Oswald’s Book of Hours and Englaland is a vision of England in which fifteen hundred years of history, culture and language exist simultaneously as an irreducible synoptic unity; my ‘interests and obsessions’ are filtered through this vision, producing the diversity of language, forms and range of reference that characterises both books. Ultimately, the heteroglossic mode of Oswald & Englaland is as much a product of ideology as accident or aesthetics.
I’ve often suspected that the relative unorthodoxy of my work has alienated the more provincial (Kavanagh’s usage) editors but I don’t really know this for sure. My editor at Smokestack Books, Andy Croft, has said that ‘only Smokestack’ would have published Oswald’s Book of Hours, and he might be right.
SHEENAGH: "Since I began to write again in 2003" – yes, I gathered from your website that you'd taken a break from writing and then come back to it. What made that happen, and if you actually stopped writing altogether, how else did you express the thoughts and concerns that feel so urgent in your recent work?
STEVE: I stopped writing when I went to University in 1988. I’d been writing poetry for five or six years and had reached a decent standard and had begun to think of myself as a ‘good’ poet. I think the energy I’d hitherto been putting into writing simply went into my studies. I also became very active in the Green Party about that time, so that might also have played a role in sucking up my time. In 1992 I left the Greens, joined the Socialist Workers Party — and became a secondary school teacher. My creativity was channelled into pedagogy and selling papers on the street. In the mid-1990s I began to read a lot of true crime and crime fiction. I made two abortive attempts to write thrillers. But in the period 1988-2003 I didn’t write any poetry at all — and barely read any. I left the SWP in 1996 and became politically quiescent. I’ve remained so to this day. (I don’t count simply ‘having opinions’, even on social media (or in poems), as being politically engaged — you’ve got to join, campaign, organise, commit, sacrifice.) I don’t think I expressed myself at all creatively during that period. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so prolific since starting up again. I’ve got years of stored-up unconscious to download.
SHEENAGH: Glad to hear it! Your poems don't shy away from politics or indeed polemic. I know you feel the past is always in the present anyway, but do you use historical parallels to get some distance from the subject, to approach it from an angle rather than head-on?
STEVE: Not consciously, although I do affirm the past to critique the present. I’ve just written a Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin. The play addresses modern themes: it’s an affirmation and exploration of the irrational in the context of the ‘New Atheism’s’ scorched earth kulturkampf against ‘religion’. However, it’s set in first century A.D. Palestine and written in an approximation to an early sixteenth century style — alliterative blank verse — which I suppose is a political choice in itself.
Having said that, I rarely set out to write a ‘political poem’; however, because my poetry is engaged (that is it proceeds from vision and position) there is often a political (or at least public) dimension to it. My poem ‘Spearhafoc’, for example, began as an attempt to evoke the spirit of the sparrowhawk (in response to a particularly striking photograph of the bird), but as it stands is largely a defiant affirmation of a specific kind of working-class outlawry; I didn’t intend that. It’s just that the network of associations sparked off by ‘sparrowhawk’ include the Book of St. Albans, A Kestrel for a Knave, Kes, trespass, poaching, egg collecting, eyass ‘scrumping’ and the violence and confrontations which are inevitably associated with and follow from those things. In some sections of Englaland’s ‘Mongrel Blood Imperium’, I consciously adopted a less ‘poetic’, more direct and contemporary voice in order to present arguments, expose the faltering in my process and to convey uncertainty and bewilderment (and also to give some relief from the intensity and pace that otherwise characterised that 200 page poem. Overall, I think the decision was the right one. However, the shift to a more direct register, motivated by political as much as aesthetic considerations, came at the cost of music and a dilution of the linguistic resource. A more oblique approach gives greater space in which the imagination can roam and provides a greater range of resources to appropriate.
SHEENAGH: You use a lot of different forms – offhand I can think of ballads, unrhymed sonnets, alliterative verse, prose-poems in various formats. How does a poem, or a sequence of poems, find its ideal form, the one that feels right to you?
STEVE: I generally plan what I’m going to do, taking into account theme, content, language, intention, etc. Oswald’s Book of Hours was modelled on the structure of a mediaeval Book of Hours, which generally open with a Calendar (of Holy Days, etc), proceed via a formalised sequence of prayers and Psalms and conclude with ‘Memorials to the Saints’. Having settled on this general structure, I then proceeded on a utilitarian, practical basis (one of my major aims was simply to prevent the book becoming too long), hence the large number of short, sonnet-like poems — deciding to write a sonnet is my way of telling myself to keep it brief. My unpublished collection, the compleat eater was conceived of partially as a provocative comment on form — it’s written in unpunctuated and justified columns of lower case text and defines itself as poetry via rhythm, compression and lexis. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ is an improvised form, its nine line stanzas, with the last line being much longer than the rest, is being a stylisation of the traditional rendering of the nine-syllable song of the yellowhammer — ‘a little bit of bread and no cheeeeeese’.
However, although I am and will always be a planner, I’m increasingly giving myself flexibility within the broad outline of any given plan. My work-in-progress Incendium Amoris is planned and structured and has movement and direction. However, within the broad intention, I’m giving myself considerable heuristic freedom in executing the various poems. I haven’t always done this; I haven’t always thought it necessary to. Oswald’s Book of Hours for example, was planned poem-by-poem, in great detail. I stuck to the plan throughout, with very few departures. ‘Werewolf’, my just-completed pamphlet-length sequence, was similarly very tightly planned and has a quite intricate organisational structure. However, the general trend in my work is for looser planning and greater spontaneity. Having said that, I’m increasingly interested in identifying forms that might complement my ‘English idiom’ and to that end I’ve begun to explore and experiment. I’m becoming particularly interested in ballad forms, odes, sprung rhythm, the Arabic qasida (I’ve just written an alliterative poem based on an Old English charm in a qasida-derived form) and in techniques (parallelism, repetition, lexical economy) used in the various English Bibles.
SHEENAGH: Yes, while Oswald's Book of Hours actually was laid out like a mediaeval book of devotions, Englaland was far looser and longer, and I know its published form wasn't, for space reasons, quite what you had planned, but what sort of a shape did you see it as being?
STEVE: Englaland was conceived of (in 2009, when I started writing it) as the thing it became, a wide-ranging epic that affirms, uncovers, critiques and transforms ideas of England and Englishness. The intention was to create a number of pamphlet-length sequences or long poems that could stand alone, but that would also be in thematic and other relation to each other, mutually commenting on, reinforcing and illuminating and thus creating a unity in which the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. Englaland was planned and structured quite carefully from the beginning, although it did develop. Oswald’s Book of Hours, for example was originally planned to be a section of Englaland, but it grew too long for the piece. ‘Big Billy’ was originally the centre-piece of a five poem alliterative sequence (‘Feast’) about the Good Friday fair at Brierley Common, but it grew to dominate the other poems (in terms of length) so much that I discarded the others. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ was a relatively late addition to the plan and ‘The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ had to be sacrificed at the proof stage due to reasons of space — which grieved me no end, because all the component parts of the book are integral. If there is ever a reprint, I’d like to reincorporate ‘Scouse’, although that will probably add another fifteen or twenty pages to the book.
SHEENAGH: Both your collections have been very male worlds. In Oswald's Book of Hours, the only females I recall being spoken of with affection or respect were the Virgin Mary and various lurchers, and in fact there were several references to women that could be seen as casually misogynist, which was fair enough since they were in the voice of Nevison, who could hardly speak like a New Man. There was one in Englaland that bothered me a bit more, because though it was in a ballad about Nevison, it was in a narrator's voice: "he robbed the rich, man and bitch". If that had been, say, "cur and bitch", it'd be just the natural resentment of the poor against the rich. But it uses a neutral word for the male victim and a loaded, pejorative one for the female. What's the rationale there? And do you see your poetry continuing to be so male-dominated?
STEVE: Quite a few people have commented on the male world of these two books and gently implied that there may be misogyny at work. I’ve just had a quick trawl through Oswald’s Book of Hours and noted (in addition to Our Lady and the various female lurchers and long dogs) ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to Mary Tudor & Elizabeth Barton (‘Obsecro te’ & ‘O intemerata’), the un-named Flemish girl in ‘Beati, quorum remissae’, my daughter in the first poem of ‘Hours of the Dead’, Mary Magdalen in the poem of that name in ‘Memorials of the Saints’ and Margaret of Kirkeby in ‘Richard Rolle’. A similar trawl through Englaland reveals ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to ‘a girl’ in poem ‘X’ of ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’; ‘domestics and milkmaids’ in poem ‘XXI’; there are ‘affectionate’ if not ‘respectful’ references to women (and men) in ‘Eight Miles Out’; Lady Julia Warde-Aldam turns up in ‘Reverend John Harnett Jennings'; there are incidental but ‘respectful’ references to women in ‘The Field Church, Frickley’; ‘the booze-loosened lasses’ of ‘Big Billy’ are portrayed ‘affectionately’ and, I think ‘respectfully’; ‘Krakumal’ is Ragnar’s death-bed paean to his wife, Aslaug (Kraka); several women are mentioned in ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ and ‘Mrs Duffy’ gets a poem to herself. So maybe there are more ‘positive’ or at least ‘neutral’ references to women than you think.
The specific reference you make to possible casual misogyny (in ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’), in which the narrator uses the term ‘bitch’ in lieu of ‘woman’, may actually be compounded by his subsequent reference to the innkeeper’s adulterous wife as a ‘whore’. However, the narrator of ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’ is a working-class raconteur of a certain type, an outlaw and provocateur himself , hymning his hero’s deviance in a deliberately scandalous way, variously praising his hero’s fecklessness, his penchant for armed robbery and running protection rackets, his contempt for the rich, his treachery, womanising and reckless cunning. The poem ends with the narrator himself threatening the audience. The narrator’s possible misogyny is part of a range of disreputable attitudes he owns.
Of course, at a more basic level, I needed a rhyme for ‘rich’ and ‘bitch’ fitted the bill. I’m not sure my narrator would’ve used ‘cur’, though; ‘cur’ is not really in the vernacular as a synonym for ‘man’ the same way that ‘bitch’ (however much you might deplore it) is for ‘woman’. A few years ago I got into a similar minor controversy with some fellow writers over the use of racist terms by one of my narrators and some of my characters in my unpublished (the various poems were published in magazines and journals) book, JerUSAlem. One of the major themes of JerUSAlem is race and racism in the context of the ‘American Dream’ and concepts of the USA as ‘promised land’. Some of my characters and narrators were racists of various stripes and this was reflected in their language. I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem.
However, to return to your fundamental point, both collections are undoubtedly very male worlds. Why is my world a male world? I suppose the content and themes of Oswald and Englaland — warfare, fighting, hunting, poaching, outlawry, revolution and so on — are bound to import a male bias. Plus, I am a man. I suppose I write about manly things. Looking at my most recent work: Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God is ‘very male’; given that its subject is violence, war, terrorism and genocide, it was always likely to be. Incendium Amoris is essentially ‘about love’, and as such is more balanced, genderwise. Enganche is about football. Ten poems in, it’s a very male world indeed. It’s just the way it is. I would never consciously attempt to compensate. I don’t write to be representative. I write because I’m obsessive-compulsive.
SHEENAGH: "I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem." No indeed, and I wish to heaven that more readers would see the difference between narrative and character voice. As Chaucer says,
whoso will tell a tale after a man,
he moot reherce, as ny as ever he can,
everich word, if it be in his charge,
al speak he never so rudeliche and at large
Having said that, of course the sly old soul knew very well that it was he, the author, who chose his narrators and their tones and attitudes. I suppose it's the tone of some of your narrators' comments on women, rather than what they actually say, that sticks in the mind. Admittedly there's room for different interpretations: for instance "big-bosomed" could be glossed as "maternal" or "nurturing" rather than "belongs on Page 3", while "booze-loosened lasses" maybe sounds affectionate in a male ear but contemptuous in a female one? But what I'm really getting at is the clear, unconditional love that shows in the voices of your male narrators when they talk of their dogs, and which I don't hear elsewhere. It reminds me of when R S Thomas, in his autobiography, speaks of goldcrests: "I dote on them, the pretty little things". This comes as a terrific surprise, because he never says anything half so affectionate about his own wife and son (whose conception is explained in the sentence "The vicar's wife had expressed a desire for a child"). I don't suppose that means he didn't have feelings for them but he seems to have saved all his own expressiveness for the goldcrests. Hey, maybe I've been coming at this from the wrong angle; is it that your male narrators, too, feel less embarrassed expressing sentiments for animals?
STEVE: ‘Big-bosomed’ alludes to the comment Richard Rolle made to Margaret of Kirkeby during one of their conversations — that she had ‘gret papys’. She was a nun, he her spiritual advisor and confessor, which set certain boundaries. However, within that context, their relationship was loving and passionate and reading-between-the-lines, charged with sexual tension. ‘Booze-loosened lasses’ needs to be understood in the context of the drunken, tongue-in-cheek, sexual banter envisaged. Think hen party-meets-stag do at the races. ‘Lads laughing and lathered, lurching and leering’ at the ‘flirty, fresh faced fillies’ who ‘bar-barge’ Big Billy, ‘pouting promises for paid on porter’ — which may or may not be honoured. Maybe it’s a class thing; or maybe I’m a sly old soul myself. I think is easier for many people (not just men) to profess unconditional love to those utterly dependent and inarticulate (animals, babies) because those objects can’t muddy the emotional waters by articulating a reciprocal love (or rejection, even) — which is by definition a demand, a contract, a constraint. I suppose loving animals is in some respects an expression of solipsism or narcissism. Loving animals could also be an expression of alienation — maybe my working class narrators love their dogs because they come alive when working them in a way they simply can’t in their constrained quotidian — work, responsibility, debt, domesticity. The running dog is an emblem of freedom and escape — and a means of catharsis. Alternatively, perhaps I’m just sick of poems about ‘feelings’.
SHEENAGH: And while we're on the subject, do you have any theories as to why so many male poets are also birders? I can think of half a dozen male poets I know or know of, who are keen birdwatchers, and not a single female poet. If it weren't for that gender difference, one could formulate some high-flown (ha!) theory about flying being the ultimate escapism and poetry being another form of it, but it won't work for one sex only.
STEVE: It’s true — David Morley, Gregory Leadbetter, and Gerry Cambridge come to mind straight away. Pat explanation of why many men are birdwatchers and many male birdwatchers are poets: the alleged male hunting instinct sublimated to ‘capturing’ and ‘possession’ via the technical skills of identification, knowledge of habitat, etc fieldcraft, identification and classification. Birding poets effect a secondary sublimation: as opposed to being twitched, listed or sketched in the Alwych, the birds are written about, or otherwise incorporated in poems. I don’t list (except on my annual spring trip to Uist), but I frequently boast that 46 species of bird are named in Oswald’s Book of Hours. It’s the Hughes thing from Poetry in the Making — writing a poem is like ‘capturing animals’. Having said all that, I cheerfully concede that it might well be trite rubbish. Bird-watching and writing poetry is what you do when you escape for the world, even to engage with it. They’re both expressions of alienation and exile, a prophetic separation; Elijah in the wilderness being fed by ravens, in refuge from persecution, earthquake and fire, finding his still, small voice.
SHEENAGH: What do you plan to do next? There was a playlet in Englaland, plus a sort of mini-epic in alliterative verse; are you drawn to do more in those genres?
STEVE: I’ve just about finished two books of poetry. Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God explores the human capacity for extremism and violence. The aforementioned ‘Werewolf’ and The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ have found homes in this book, along with my narrative sonnet-sequence ‘True Crime’ and my Poetry Society commission ‘How Dear is Life’. Incendium Amoris is a collection of poems arising from the life, writings and landscapes of the fourteenth century mystic Richard Rolle. I’ve recently written a Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin which explores issues of rationality/irrationality and is a subtle and insightful contribution to the otherwise crass sloganeering of the ‘Religion vs Science’ debate. I’ve started work on a collection ‘about football’, provisionally entitled Enganche. I’ve got ideas for tracts, pamphlets and plays set in the revolutionary tumults of the seventeenth and fourteenth centuries and I have two abandoned novels I’d like to revive.
SHEENAGH: I utterly love the idea of tracts and pamphlets! If I could have lived in a former age (not that I would want to, and nor would George Mackay Brown if he'd had to cook on an open fire instead of grumbling about the decadence of stoves) I would choose the Commonwealth times when there was such an explosion of printed material, when the Welsh tailor Arise Evans could become a noted author of religious books and women could preach. What era do you think would have suited you best, and what would have been your fate in it?
STEVE: I love the ferment of the English revolution and its literary expression — Winstanley, Coppe, Tyranipocrit Uncovered, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers, although my favourite poem of that period is the fierce music of the fifty-nine signatures listed on Charles Stewart’s death warrant. Me and Alice Oswald. It’s a pity literacy in our language wasn’t sufficiently developed in 1381 to leave more evidence about the Peasant’s Revolt, although, ‘whan Adam delved and Eve spanne, who then was the gentilman?’, is fine poetry and as clear a piece of class analysis as you could wish for. Some of John Ball’s communications have survived, including the following, which I incorporated in my poem ‘John Ball’, (from Oswald’s Book of Hours):
Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal.
The Kynges sone of hevene schal pay for al.
Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your freend
fro your foo. Haveth ynow, and seith ‘Hoo!’
There were no Lords in Eden’s commune. But if I had to choose a period to transport myself to it would have been the period immediately post 1066. I’d have joined what the historian Peter Rex has called ‘The English Resistance’ against Guillaume the Bastard’s genocidal asset-stripping of England and the North in particular. I would have chopped a few Frenchmen before being disembowelled and hung from a gibbet by my thumbs. Stoves aren’t decadent. They’re necessary. Stove PLC is the problem. It denies stoves at all to those who can’t pay and puts the Amazon through a wood chipper to build super-deluxe diamond-encrusted platinum stoves for Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich.
More poems and links
Objective One
Through the mists of an April dawn
a crowd flowed along Manvers Way, so many,
I had not thought the dole had undone so many,
sending them herded from the fuming valleys
of Dearne and Dove and Don and Rother,
into the bus bays and car parks of Ventura,
ASOS and Next PC, where they pour
from Nissans, Vauxhalls and private hire minicabs,
lighting cigarettes, adjusting iPhones,
pressing mobiles to their ears, striding out
in polished patent, pinstripes breaking
on the buckled instep, tailored skirts
and long coats flaring on the breeze.
Sixty thousand work here, in logistics,
call-centres, light industry and retail,
along the roundabouted blacktop
from Birdwell to Barnsdale, the EU funded
M1 to A1 link road. Objective One,
bringing light to parochial darkness,
access, investment, enterprise, jobs;
until sterling collapses, Kolkata undercuts
and the market-zeitgeist lurches,
retrenching capital in gold and gilts
and the provincia flips once more
to wrecking-ball brownfield-bombsite,
the full monty of dole and dereliction,
where brassed-off, hand-to-mouth yokels
are abandoned to dearth and absurdity,
their eh-ba-gum tutu dreams.
Once there were woods and open fields,
fens in the flatland, villages on the hill.
Bullheads in the millstream, polecats
in the warren; red kite, raven, white-tailed eagle,
over the wolf-prowled heath. Danelaw sokeland,
assarted from wildwood, torp in the langthwaite clays;
the Anglecynn muster at Ringstone Hill,
where three wapentakes meet; Oswald's grange
by the holy well – belltower, gatehouse,
carucates for geld. Here, beyond Whitwell
and the five boroughs, beyond Mercia's
clement mid-lands, we will beat the bounds
at rogationtide from Bamburgh, Danum,
Durham and York; the dragon-prowed river,
the waycross on the roman road, hoar apple tree,
whit's gospel thorn, the tumulus at Askern Hill;
these are the roots that clutch, these the sprouting corpses,
these are the fragments I shore against my ruins.
(From Englaland)
John Ball
Wycliffe's words and Langland's gave the Englisc
back their tongue. Manor french and church latin
cut-off in the throat, battening behind
the buttresses of keeps and cathedrals,
parsing and declining. Johon Schepe
proclaims his hedgerow gospel, singing
from the furze like a yellowhammer:
Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal.
The Kynges sone of hevene schal pay for al.
Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your freend
fro your foo. Haveth ynow, and seith ‘Hoo!’
There were no lords in Eden's commune
Scythes sharpened on whetstones, gente non sancta.
War will follow the Word.
(From Oswald's Book of Hours)
The Song of the Yellowhammer from Englaland can be found here.
Smokestack Books, Steve Ely's publisher
Steve Ely's website
July 13, 2015
A political poet
" Some of his verses provoked resentment in Conservative circles" (Wikipedia on Francis Lauderdale Adams): well, you couldn't wish for a better epitaph than that, really. Adams (1862-93), brought up in England but emigrated to Australia, was one of those turn-of-the-century Christian Socialists for whom religion and politics more or less merged. There is, inevitably, quite a lot of fin-de-siècle high-flown over-poetic style about some of his work, but then every so often he comes up with a brief gem like "To the Christians", insisting on Christ as son of a carpenter rather than of a god:
TAKE, then, your paltry Christ,
Your gentleman God.
We want the carpenter's son,
With his saw and hod.
We want the man who loved
The poor and the oppressed,
Who hated the Rich man and King
And the Scribe and the Priest.
We want the Galilean
Who knew cross and rod.
It's your 'good taste' that prefers
A bastard 'God!'
or "Hagar", in which the trials of Abraham's handmaid are updated but the hoped-for divine intervention never materializes:
SHE went along the road,
Her baby in her arms,
The night and its alarms
Made deadlier her load.
Her shrunken breasts were dry;
She felt the hunger bite.
She lay down in the night,
She and the child, to die.
But it would wail, and wail,
And wail. She crept away.
She had no word to say,
Yet still she heard it wail.
She took a jagged stone;
She wished it to be dead.
She beat it on the head;
It only gave one moan.
She has no word to say;
She sits there in the night.
The east sky glints with light,
And it is Christmas Day!
Poor chap shot himself aged 30, during a TB-caused haemorrhage which would probably have killed him anyway. I have a soft spot for him, as you can probably tell.
TAKE, then, your paltry Christ,
Your gentleman God.
We want the carpenter's son,
With his saw and hod.
We want the man who loved
The poor and the oppressed,
Who hated the Rich man and King
And the Scribe and the Priest.
We want the Galilean
Who knew cross and rod.
It's your 'good taste' that prefers
A bastard 'God!'
or "Hagar", in which the trials of Abraham's handmaid are updated but the hoped-for divine intervention never materializes:
SHE went along the road,
Her baby in her arms,
The night and its alarms
Made deadlier her load.
Her shrunken breasts were dry;
She felt the hunger bite.
She lay down in the night,
She and the child, to die.
But it would wail, and wail,
And wail. She crept away.
She had no word to say,
Yet still she heard it wail.
She took a jagged stone;
She wished it to be dead.
She beat it on the head;
It only gave one moan.
She has no word to say;
She sits there in the night.
The east sky glints with light,
And it is Christmas Day!
Poor chap shot himself aged 30, during a TB-caused haemorrhage which would probably have killed him anyway. I have a soft spot for him, as you can probably tell.
July 12, 2015
Review of The Man at the Corner Table by Rosie Shepperd, pub. Seren 2015
Sometimes a collection has an unusually apt title, and so it is here. The actual man at the corner table is a very minor character in the first poem, "You all have lied"; he just happens to remind the narrator of someone else and she begins to interpret him in that light ("Or that's the way I see it"). We have, then, an observational narrator, the focus of whose sharp observation is often something on the periphery, that might otherwise go unnoticed, and who then creates stories, sometimes extremely fanciful ones, out of what she sees. When I interviewed Rosie Shepperd for this blog, I suggested the Victorian slang word "slantendicular" as a description for her way of seeing and writing, and I'd stick by that as a description of this collection.
The keenness of her eye and ear shows through both in her use of telling detail, like the "sweet circular soap" at the hotel of assignation in "A seedy narrative or moments of lyrical stillness?" and in her use of voice, in poems like "What I need, Bernard, is a bit of notice…" where the harassed wife, talking to her dying husband and trying to finalise funeral arrangements, is both faintly comical and utterly credible:
Are you headlong on Berlioz?
               I'm not trying to split hairs
                                         in your last hours but I have to tell you,
                         for most of us, March to the Scaffold is tricky and
                                         we'll need a pick-me-up
                         with Stuart and Audrey
                                                            bringing Marion from Stevenage.
Her sense of the humorous and indeed ludicrous in human behaviour and relationships, together with her willingness to follow Corporal Jones into the realms of fantasy, make these poems very entertaining to read – it isn't so often that "serious", thought-provoking, moving poems are also downright funny. But the humour never morphs into cruelty or condescension; she has great sympathy for her cast of often oddball characters. The end of Bernard's wife's one-sided conversation with him is tender, if still obsessed with funeral catering:
Your hands were always fresh and cool,
                                                rather like ham, Bernard, rather like
                                                            a nice tinned ham.
In "A seedy narrative or moments of lyrical stillness?" the question mark makes it clear that what could be read as a quick, meaningless sexual encounter might also be seen as something more tender and significant. And in "Syzygy", the storm phenomenon where sun, moon and earth align with devastating consequences becomes a striking image for a couple whose marriage seems not to have been as close as it might, before they were whirled into the air:
When the storm spins them tight like a bobbin, their mouths spring open
in a double O and I am almost sure I hear a gasp at right angles to the rain.
It skids down the roof as Mr Jarvis follows Mrs Jarvis along the gutter,
their faces drained of colour, her all-weather mac blown out in a parade.
He wears tan driving gloves and puts one hand on his wife’s left arm.
She holds his finger in one of her mittens, the one with a lime green run.
With some shyness, they peep just inside the second floor of our house.
The unity they finally achieve is genuinely moving:
Mr Jarvis nods, looks at his wife, then over her shoulder at the clouds that
line the unexpected sky and, at a distance, I see surprise in their eyes.
They laugh at the same time as their arms struggle, then join in a circle,
their shoulders suddenly sure how to bend towards each other, to be together,
at once aligned, even if this is not really, quite the end.
Unsurprisingly in such a poet, she is very aware of tastes, colours, textures, smells, "the silver inside rosemary needles" ("I must lie down where all ladders start") and the "green mist of tea that shapes/the air at Lock Cha" ("You are here"). There are poems here that take a keen delight in the sensual pleasure of food, but they are not "foodie" poems, because behind the food we sense always the relationships it implies and for which it so often becomes a metaphor, as in "I know I've gone too far when I think of papardelle with broccoli":
It doesn't matter and would not matter to you that you didn't
               like this dish, but even as I warm
your favourite bowl, I smile at my final stab, add purple sprouting
               broccoli, diagonally cut.
You might like the colours, the way the steam holds the flavour
               of Alpine milk and the bitter
black pepper that falls in so many places like sand or gravel or ash.
As you can see, one of the many things by which this poet does not feel limited is conventional layout. Some poems are completely left-hand justified; many are not, and spread themselves exuberantly over the whole space available on the page. If I thought this needed any excuse, I would suggest that it can be a good way of controlling pace, goes with the headlong, tumbling sentences she often likes to use (and which are such a change from the tidy, clipped lyricism of many collections) and just generally adds a sense of freedom to the whole concern. But actually it annoys me that anyone feels there has to be an excuse for unusual lineation: why is left-hand justification the default for which there needs to be no reason other than the convenience of editors and printers anyway?
I have known Rosie Shepperd's work for some time, and this collection excites me not just because of what's in it – a skilled, urbane, humorous, totally individual voice that simply doesn't sound like any other – but for what is not. I was flicking through looking for poems I'd liked and remembered, just as good as those that made the collection, and they weren't there, which means not just that this poet had strength in depth to choose from, but that she has the nucleus of another collection. I do hope it comes soon, and that many will realise, as Seren had the wit to do, what an unusual, energetic, sparkling voice this is. Any publisher who failed to see the potential of this collection should now be quietly kicking himself.
