Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 35

Review of To the Boneyard by Barbara Marsh (Eyewear Publishing 2013)

There are words
like manhole covers
("The things we come down to")

because they hide the shafts of memory, though with all their danger they can also be the tunnels that lead to wonderland. To the Boneyard is a collection fascinated both by language and by journeys, as you would expect from an émigrée poet. I have a special fondness for displaced poets, because they always seem, in their work, on the way to or from somewhere; they never quite finish either leaving or arriving and it gives their work an edge, especially in the way they see things. Many of these poems are set on the move: on trains, planes, roads. "Greyhound" pays a conscious homage, in the line "Home is ninety-three hours away", to "24 Hours from Tulsa", but where the man in the song fails to arrive home because he is distracted by a woman, the narrator of Marsh's poem has no real reason for staying at the truckstop where she happens to be, except a curiosity to know

what this place looks like
in the spring, how blue-cragged
those mountains will be.

It is more, in fact, that she has no especial reason to go "home", wherever that is, and other narrators in the collection show the same shallow-rooting quality of the traveller:

I root
along the side of things, like salt in cracks
of skin
("Cellular life")

Yet memory is hugely important to the displaced, the prism of the past through which they see the present, so that, quite often, time seems in these poems to telescope to a single point. In "Billboards", the adult narrator remembers childhood journeys with her father that were full of words – on maps, on roadside hoardings that

led to cities – words first, then boulevards
and buildings.

The child sang road-names, as her father sang nursery rhymes – "to the boneyard/ you must go ". Now, though, he is losing language.

Now you say That's a good word. Then
repeat it. As if you’ve never heard it. Now
we drive down roads I don't recognise.

Language as a map, the key that makes sense of the world and our journeys in it, reappears in other poems, like "Beck and call", the world of which is effectively shaped by a word-game, a repeated syllable with a changing vowel, and "Definite article", where a life is pared down to nouns.

Indeed it sometimes seems, in a transient world, that recording experience in words is the only way we can keep it. In "Kefalonia", a couple on an adulterous two-week break find that memory alone will not serve:

She swam every Ionian cove they could find,
back and forth its entire width,

and again the next day, to make it more real.
Each bay disappeared
as soon as they mounted the hill to the road.

On the return flight, the man is quiet, "already absent", with the economy and understatement that create such a sense of inevitability in this poem and the collection as a whole. In "Pensacola Beach Bridge", one of the collection's last poems, a structure recalled from childhood is destroyed by a storm and the narrator reflects "Perhaps there's no bridge to anywhere we've been". But there is, we know by now; it is the map of language that enables her, and us, to fix memory and, in a limited sense, to defeat the passing of time.

Review of "An Abridged History…" by Andrew Drummond, pub. Polygon, 2004

Actually the title is "An Abridged History of the Construction of the RAILWAY LINE Between Garve, Ullapool and Lochinver; And other pertinent matters: Being the Professional JOURNAL and Regular Chronicle of ALEXANDER AUCHMUTY SETH KININMONTH". Apparently some bookshops mis-shelved it under History, which says little for their acumen, as the words "A novel by Andrew Drummond" also appear on the front cover. But he may well have intended them to be misled, for a major theme of this book is the divide between truth and fiction, and how far we can be sure that what we think fact actually is so.

The story indeed is a melange of "real" history, fictionalised history and downright invention which is near-impossible to disentangle. There really was a projected Garve-Ullapool railway, which was partly built but abandoned for lack of funds. And there was a Melchior Rinck, a German Anabaptist, though he lived some three centuries before the events in which he is here concerned. The Kerguelen islands exist, but were never home to a colony of Scots abandoned there by a heartless captain – though, of course, plenty of Scots during the clearances were duped into sailing for promised lands that turned out to be places of desolation. The revolutionary events of 1897 in Ullapool are pure invention… probably, for as our narrator observes, "it seems likely to be in the interests of Government not to report such events as I believe took place in Ullapool, for fear that similar sedition might be sown in other parts of the land […] This would not be the first time that historical events have been concealed from an en-thralled Nation."

This narrator of ours, Kininmonth, is a railway engineer, a rationalist who ends up embroiled in a religious revival in which he never believes, and a basically conventional, respectable man whose politics, by the end of the book, are on the revolutionary side of socialist. He's a loner with a great curiosity, a certain primness and a dry wit, and he can be, both intentionally and unintentionally, very funny. His story begins in the reality of constructing the line from Garve, hampered by weather, midges and a fancy for one of the navvies' wives: "Wicked thoughts cross my mind, which I can attribute only to the increasing temperature and the scents on the breezes of April". But with the advent of the hedge-preacher Rinck and his friends the Irvines, refugees from the community on Kerguelen, events begin to take a surreal turn. The Kerguelen Scots had stayed two generations on their desolate island, because passing whalers who stopped to revictual constantly told them of dire events in the outside world- the Great Whaling War between Finland and Paraguay, tidal waves in Paris and Rome, plague in Spain. To Kininmonth, hearing their narrative, the truth seems plain: "it was to the advantage of the Norwegians that the poor emigrants stayed on Kerguelen, to stock the whaling ships [..] and for this reason alone, the Norwegians had fabricated such sagas and tales. My spirit grew heavy with thoughts of the wickedness of men against men."

Later, however, he has a surprise. He and James Irvine meet an Icelandic widow in the wilds of Scotland and Irvine condoles with her on the "war" between her country and Turkey. Kininmonth, naturally taking this for another tall tale told by the whalers, is astonished when the woman confirms its truth. This is in fact a reference to the raid on Heimaey in 1627 by Barbary pirates, who kidnapped and enslaved 234 Icelanders. All the Barbary pirates were known in the West as "Turks", and to this day the Icelandic liturgy includes a prayer for protection against the wrath of the Turk. The whalers, presumably, had based some of their tales loosely on real events, but it leaves Kininmonth disoriented: "what if all the other stories told to the people of Kerguelen also had some basis in truth? What if there were wars and campaigns indeed between the most unlikely opponents […] What if the stories we read in newspapers were undiluted invention, as much a fiction as this History is fact?" From this point on, Kininmonth is never entirely sure if any person is speaking the truth, and nor can we be.

This sets up an ending with a device whose use in any novel is very daring, because it has been much discredited. In this case I think it works, because of the kind of novel this is. Even after the end, the writer has not done playing with our sense of what is real, for there are pages of the kind of publishers' advertisements that books of Kininmonth's era used to include. Some are straight spoofs on the improving and juvenile books of the day – "Dick and His Donkey: by the author of Hugh and His Husky", but some are allegedly by characters in the book and would, if real, necessarily subvert the facts as we now think we know them. Some have reviewers' endorsements, like this, allegedly from The Midlothian Advertiser; "A Most Interesting and Clever Book. I was startled at how little I understood".

That made me laugh, as this novel often did, but I suspect Drummond may mean it seriously and indeed it would serve to describe this book – not at all in the sense that it is a difficult read; it's anything but, never forgetting its entertainment function, but in the sense that having read it, we realise that it may be saying far more than first appeared, and that we shall need to read it again to be sure. Luckily, this is no hardship. I found this in a cut-price Aberdeen bookshop; if you have to look in AbeBooks, be assured it'll be worth the trouble.

Review of Oswald's Book of Hours, by Steve Ely, pub. Smokestack Books

I've read nearly 200 poetry collections this year, and most have disappeared into the mists of forgettery. This one was memorable for many reasons, but mainly because it does not come from what might be called the usual place.

It is easy to please readers by telling them what they want to hear, expressing opinions they share. And much poetry does just that. There is a liberal consensus among poets and their regular readers; many are in the same part of the political spectrum and share views on gender, race, sexuality etc. Religion is more divisive; there are atheist and religious poets, but even then, few extremes, because the default world-view, among European poets at least, is a polite, apologetic, near-universal tolerance. If other views are expressed by a persona the poet has chosen to adopt, s/he will generally make it clear that this is a persona, whose views are not being presented for the reader's approval; in fact the reader may be encouraged to disapprove or mock.

So if you create voices that speak, amongst other things, of their pleasure in killing (voices of highwaymen, men who hunt with dogs, Afghanistan veterans) and you do not present them as people necessarily to be abhorred, you must work quite hard to overcome an intrinsic recoil among many readers. As a pacifist who loathes the mere idea of hunting, I'm not on the face of it his ideal reader, so since I found the book mesmerising, I'd say he is bloody good with words.

For one thing, he has a very clear delight in them and is not intimidated out of showing it by any possible accusations of "elitism"; he's quite ready to send you off to look up his Church-Latin titles or the Anglo-Saxon and Old English in his epigraphs and texts. Though you probably wouldn't, on a first reading, because the energy in the language and narrative would be carrying you with it. There is tremendous energy and momentum in most of these poems, especially the "voice" ones:

Lazerlight lamp-kit, slipleads, 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.

("Matins: Annunciation")

Even the dead do not stay still for long:

Under the golf course, the dead of England lie;
beneath the steel mill, their vernacular graves.
Rolling and turning in tectonic earth,
drifting turfward in turbulent methane,
the sphenoids of huscarls reveal in the borders
of the Whitehill Estate.

(from "Hours of the Dead")

The telescoping of time in this poem is typical of the collection and it has to do with a sort of folk-spirit he sees emerging over and over through English history, in figures like Robin Hood, John Nevison (highwayman, better known as Swift Nick), John Schepe (archetypal hedge-preacher), John Ball and a great many others up to the present day. In the sequence "Godspel" there are several such figures. Wat Tyler, fighting for the rights of ordinary people, is easy to sympathise with:

1. Three things: firstly, and no offence; never trust a King. That was our downfall, the idiotic peasant conceit that a divine right tyrant propped up by a cabal of mammonite murderers could ever rule with the interests of his people at heart. ‘King Richard and the true commons’ my arse

The next, Robert Aske, another campaigner for human rights betrayed by a king, is not unsympathetic either. But the last in the sequence is a soldier who died in the Falklands carrying wounded men off a mountain and might have won a medal but for his habit of taking enemy ears as trophies. He's not a nice man, but his bloody-mindedness is here connected with the fearless integrity of Tyler and Aske, and the message – the dead man is speaking from heaven - is clear:

13: It's like they say up here; Daemon est Deus inversus. Two sides of the same coin: you can't have one without the other. […] the rabble is the blood-pulse of England.

I think visions of folk-spirits can be dodgy, and many will not necessarily go along with a lot of this vision (in particular, his assessment of Scargill seems out to me, crediting the man with achievements that were mostly due to his predecessors). But in the end the memorability of poetry resides less in what it says than how it says it, and I found more power, energy, conviction and sheer verbal exuberance in this than in any other first collection I've read this year.

Review of Oswald's Book of Hours, by Steve Ely

I've read nearly 200 poetry collections this year, and most have disappeared into the mists of forgettery. This one was memorable for many reasons, but mainly because it does not come from what might be called the usual place.

It is easy to please readers by telling them what they want to hear, expressing opinions they share. And much poetry does just that. There is a liberal consensus among poets and their regular readers; many are in the same part of the political spectrum and share views on gender, race, sexuality etc. Religion is more divisive; there are atheist and religious poets, but even then, few extremes, because the default world-view, among European poets at least, is a polite, apologetic, near-universal tolerance. If other views are expressed by a persona the poet has chosen to adopt, s/he will generally make it clear that this is a persona, whose views are not being presented for the reader's approval; in fact the reader may be encouraged to disapprove or mock.

So if you create voices that speak, amongst other things, of their pleasure in killing (voices of highwaymen, men who hunt with dogs, Afghanistan veterans) and you do not present them as people necessarily to be abhorred, you must work quite hard to overcome an intrinsic recoil among many readers. As a pacifist who loathes the mere idea of hunting, I'm not on the face of it his ideal reader, so since I found the book mesmerising, I'd say he is bloody good with words.

For one thing, he has a very clear delight in them and is not intimidated out of showing it by any possible accusations of "elitism"; he's quite ready to send you off to look up his Church-Latin titles or the Anglo-Saxon and Old English in his epigraphs and texts. Though you probably wouldn't, on a first reading, because the energy in the language and narrative would be carrying you with it. There is tremendous energy and momentum in most of these poems, especially the "voice" ones:

Lazerlight lamp-kit, slipleads, 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.

("Matins: Annunciation")

Even the dead do not stay still for long:

Under the golf course, the dead of England lie;
beneath the steel mill, their vernacular graves.
Rolling and turning in tectonic earth,
drifting turfward in turbulent methane,
the sphenoids of huscarls reveal in the borders
of the Whitehill Estate.

(from "Hours of the Dead")

The telescoping of time in this poem is typical of the collection and it has to do with a sort of folk-spirit he sees emerging over and over through English history, in figures like Robin Hood, John Nevison (highwayman, better known as Swift Nick), John Schepe (archetypal hedge-preacher), John Ball and a great many others up to the present day. In the sequence "Godspel" there are several such figures. Wat Tyler, fighting for the rights of ordinary people, is easy to sympathise with:

1. Three things: firstly, and no offence; never trust a King. That was our downfall, the idiotic peasant conceit that a divine right tyrant propped up by a cabal of mammonite murderers could ever rule with the interests of his people at heart. ‘King Richard and the true commons’ my arse

The next, Robert Aske, another campaigner for human rights betrayed by a king, is not unsympathetic either. But the last in the sequence is a soldier who died in the Falklands carrying wounded men off a mountain and might have won a medal but for his habit of taking enemy ears as trophies. He's not a nice man, but his bloody-mindedness is here connected with the fearless integrity of Tyler and Aske, and the message – the dead man is speaking from heaven - is clear:

13: It's like they say up here; Daemon est Deus inversus. Two sides of the same coin: you can't have one without the other. […] the rabble is the blood-pulse of England.

I think visions of folk-spirits can be dodgy, and many will not necessarily go along with a lot of this vision (in particular, his assessment of Scargill seems out to me, crediting the man with achievements that were mostly due to his predecessors). But in the end the memorability of poetry resides less in what it says than how it says it, and I found more power, energy, conviction and sheer verbal exuberance in this than in any other first collection I've read this year.

Review of Muscovy, by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber

Like his previous collections, this one contains much journeying and much fascination with the way words work when arranged in patterns. It also reminds me of an earlier collection, Dragons, in that you can see the influence of Welsh topography and history becoming stronger in it. Above all it is notable, like all his work, for two characteristics that are not found together all that often, but that work together very well: accurate observation and creative speculation. He is very good, in other words, at both pinpointing in words exactly what he sees and imagining what he has never seen. The first quality brings a mountain to life in "Walker": sheep on its steep slopes

canted to one side,
trotting on their adjustable legs
till my upright seemed askew

and its wetness:

my feet pressed
a black oil from the spongy surface.
The hollows bristled with reeds.
One might drown there, high above the earth

- true, and quite disconcerting when one comes to think about it. The other side of him is at work in "The Man in the Moon", based on Francis Godwin's 17th-century prose fantasy of lunar exploration (the work Cyrano de Bergerac parodied). When the poem's protagonist invents goose-powered flight and tests it out with a lamb aboard, we not only see the lamb:

I tied him to the frame. The geese flapped.
the rag-doll face showed nothing.
A bleat blew away,

and for the space of two fields
he treadled the air

but also feel his own later ascent beyond weather and gravity and see earth from a new angle, the "pear with a bite out of one side" that is Africa. The same curiosity about the different enables him, in "Familiar Spirit", to inhabit the ghost that is now uncomfortable with thoughts of the humanity from which it has loosed itself:

that sugar-mouse flesh I had once,
and its hangers-on of arms and legs,
hair, toenails, parents, siblings

The title sequence, "Muscovy", chronicles another journey that must have felt fantastic in its day, the embassy to Moscow on which Andrew Marvell served in 1663-4. Again it is the observational and imaginative detail that brings it alive: the cold that "finds you in your sleep", the sauna where you bake "till your hair hurts". Its unnamed narrator (not Marvell) is by turns bemused and amused, and the humour which has always featured in Francis's poetry also surfaces in the word-games of this collection, like "Enigma Variations", an alphabet whose every verse analyses a letter by omitting it, and "Poem in Sea", whose lines each consist of three words or part-words beginning with s, e and a. Somewhat on the same plan is "Was", a poem less about the past and memory than about the way these ideas are constructed, the way smells, tastes, habits become iconic for an era:

Cabbage was cooked everywhere at once.
Curry was pacified in its circle of rice.
Wine was a sweet gold opened at Christmas.

The TV was afloat on a sea of fuzz.
It was switched on early to let it breathe.
The end of it was a diminishing star.

It's possible that those who never watched TV in the 50s and early 60s will miss just how accurate and evocative this is, which would be a pity. But this poet's curiosity, keen eye and verbal exuberance should entertain and absorb most readers.

Review of The Box of Red Brocade by Catherine Fisher (pub. Hodder)

This is the second book in the Chronoptika series which began with The Obsidian Mirror, which I reviewed here. To recap briefly, the mirror is a time portal currently in the house of Oberon Venn, who wants to use it to bring back his dead wife Leah. His best friend David has already got lost in time trying to use the mirror, and his son Jake wants to bring him back. Maskelyne, the mirror's original owner, wants it back for purposes unknown, while Sarah, a girl from the future, knows what carnage the mirror will cause there and wants to destroy it. Outside the house, in the woods, is the timeless land of the Shee, whose queen Lady Summer wants Venn. Gideon, stolen by the Shee as a baby long ago, wants to be human again but does not know if this will kill him.

Complicated... but it gets more so. There is a lot of travel between worlds and times in this second book, as people search for each other and for a talisman that may be able to destroy the mirror. It gets quite hard to keep track of who is where and who has what at any one time, and that is quite deliberate; we are meant to feel these characters' confusion, and their mutual mistrust as their alliances keep shifting. Rebecca, once very much Maskelyne's ally, begins here to detach from him and form new loyalties. Venn, who isn't completely human, is drawn toward the faery world that can give him immortality. In this extract, he is feeling the pull of his non-human side:

He heard the flowers open on the hawthorn bushes, the bees wake, the small furled buds of oak and ash and rowan rustle and uncurl. He felt the wind change and the breeze shiver, hedgehogs crisp through banks of leaves, tadpoles in the lake open their eyes and grow tails and swim in the deep water.

A theme that is beginning to emerge is the search for power. Several characters – Janus (the fearsome tyrant from the future), Lady Summer, the Victorian inventor Harcourt Symmes and his daughter, Maskelyne as far as we know, seem to want power more than anything. It's possible that Venn too is driven as much by power as love. Others, like David and Jake, Rebecca and the harassed schoolteacher Wharton, definitely seem to be driven more by concern for their fellow-humans. Since the notes of the mirror's inventor state that love is the only thing that can defeat time, they would seem to have the right of it.

There are still huge questions and mysteries, to resolve which we shall have to await volume 3. In the meantime there is the driving momentum and lyrical beauty of the prose. We are constantly being reminded of the passage of time and that the past and future are as real as the present: here Wharton has a sudden sense of the future of the building he is in:

And from deep below the house he became aware of a sound he realized he had heard all night under his pillow, in his dreams – the roar of the swollen river Wintercombe, in its deep ravine beneath the very cellars.

Hurrying after Piers, he noted rain dripping into more buckets here and there, damp green mouldy patches forming on the ceilings. The whole Abbey was leaking and running with water.

In the Monk's Walk the stone was wet under his hand, the gargoyles of lost mediaeval monsters vomiting rain through their open mouths. He sensed all at once the soft timbers, the creaking gutters, the saturated soil under the foundations, had a sudden nightmarish terror of the great building collapsing, toppling, washing away, becoming the ruin that Sarah had hinted at.

Roll on the next instalment...

Review of Jim Mainland's "The League of Notions"

I had the pleasure of doing this interview with Jim Mainland some time ago and he let me quote some poems, mostly from his collection A Package of Measures. It's been far too long since then but now we have a pamphlet, called The League of Notions (as you will have noticed, Mr Mainland has a gift for titles). It is published by Hansel Co-Operative Press, which promotes literary works relating to Shetland and Orkney, in a limited edition of 300.

One of the poems I quoted in the interview was "Performance", which is a version in the Shetlandic dialect of Les Murray's poem of that name. This appears in the present collection, along with some more Shetlandic versions: a passage from Paradise Lost and poems by Holub, Tranströmer and Murray, again. The version of Tranströmer's "April and Silence" (original here) is a good illustration of what the dialect can change and add. In the standard English translation of the original, the first verse goes

Spring lies deserted.
The dark velvet ditch
creeps by my side
not reflecting anything.

Mainland's version:

Da Voar is by wi, forlegen.
Da saft dark stank
oags alang be me side,
aa licht lang slockit.

Now some of this is straight translation, though "velvet" becomes "saft", presumably for the richness of the three varying "a" vowels in "saft dark stank" (a stank is a ditch). But the last line, "all light long since quenched" is a departure from "not reflecting anything" that very much localises the poem. A "slockit licht" was an extinguished oil-lamp, and the fiddle-tune "Da Slockit Licht", composed by the Shetland musician Tom Anderson, recorded the depopulation of Anderson's native area, the Eshaness peninsula, made obvious by the lack of lights in abandoned houses. Mainland lives in Nibon, not too far from Eshaness, an area similarly beautiful and sparsely populated. This re-creation inevitably invests the line with a vast, rueful and very particular nostalgia.

Several of the original poems are elegiac. A dead person's voice is briefly heard in a "scatter of notes", or perhaps not, "I think I hear this, but I'm not certain" ("Presence"). In "Outsourcing", the lost voice is imagined communicating in ways that vary from the traditional, "smoke signal/or talking drum" to far more contemporary ones like "a rusty pumping/of borrowed beats and bungee dub heart" whose soundtrack is a "ribby vibraphone". Mainland, who collaborates with musicians in his work, has a keen love of the music of words, and the poem "The Chestnut-eared Bunting feat. The Bobolink meet the Rockers Uptown" - whose title is slightly less baffling when you realise it relates to the influx of off-course migrant birds that hits Shetland in autumn – is an exuberant tour-de-force of language whose vibrancy echoes in sound the visual extravaganza of the birds:

This is what the green wind bashes out
or bullyblows in – an irruption by Dali

out of Gogol by Hazzard County:
strident fire between the eyestripes,

Lucifer and Freudian, quiffed and
spliffed, coxcombed and crested,

with glamrock iridescent dusting
and the starling's I-speak-in-tongues app.

Mainland is rooted in a place, as is evident from his poem "Da Field Placings", a shape- poem set out as a map of place-names ranging from the descriptive (Deepdale, The Slithers) through the intriguingly odd (Troubleton, Rumblings) to ones like Tiptoby whose story can't even be guessed at. But he is also very aware of a wider world from which his lexis and imagery come just as much as from more traditional sources. Though one could trace influences, he does not really sound like anyone else currently writing (and I have just read, by way of judging a national competition, a year's worth of collections many of which did sound quite alike). I still want another full-length collection from him, but in the meantime, this is very welcome.

Writing one's own epitaph

"…He will come out of the grave
His clothes thrown around him;
worms shall not have done their work.
His face shall beam the radiance of many suns.
His gait the bearing of a victor,
On his forehead shall shine a thousand stars"

- Kofi Awoonor, Ghanaian poet, murdered in Nairobi shopping mall by the usual pointless bigots.

Learning to Read

I’m thinking about plagiarism at the moment – well, everyone in the poetry business is – but not so much about why people do it, more about why they often get away with it so long. I don’t think there is a single easy answer, but two elements seem to me to be an undue emphasis on “personal story” and an inexactness both in writing and reading.

See, here’s a poem by Laurence Lieberman (The Osprey Suicides) which describes, in quite a lot of informed detail, an osprey diving on a garfish. Next the Australian poet Graham Nunn writes, or I should say constructs, a poem called “The Goshawk”, using techniques he describes as sampling, mixing, or, most memorably “ I’m reading a poem or listening to a song that a door opens and my mind flashes with images from my personal history. It may be a phrase, a line, a metaphor that triggers this, but when it occurs, I give myself over to the images and ensure I capture them. In doing this, the framework of the poem is used to tell my own story and parts of the original text are creatively appropriated in the formation of a new work”. Quite a few parts of Lieberman's poem, in fact, like the phrases “traces the periphery”, “drops like a discharged projectile” and “like a small geyser”. Hm. (It’s archived on this page, though you need to scroll down some). What Nunn does change, though, is an osprey into a goshawk. But this transformation seems to have been a little incomplete, because this remarkable goshawk is still, like the osprey, diving into the sea and hauling out a fish (mullet this time). That will come as a surprise to the RSPB, who are under the impression that the goshawk is a land bird which eats small mammals and birds.

This, of course, makes a nonsense of the “personal story” claim. The osprey poem cannot possibly have recalled to Nunn a personal memory of a goshawk acting as no goshawk ever did. The claim is, ironically in the circumstances, symptomatic of a modern attitude that a poem is somehow validated by being “true” or part of one’s “personal story”. This may in fact be one reason people plagiarise: if their own personal story isn’t interesting enough, they don’t think first of embellishing it or going beyond it, as you’d expect a writer of fiction to do, but rather of nicking someone else’s, like some wannabe mis-mem author who hasn’t had quite enough mis happen to them.

What’s more alarming is that it took me two readings of the goshawk poem to realise it had to be baloney. Once it dawned, of course, it was obvious; I am no ornithologist but I do know the habits of the commoner birds. That first time, I hadn’t read properly or carefully; I had registered “goshawk” as “bird”, as in “yet another bird poem”. And since the poem has been online for over a year without anyone, apparently, pointing out the error of this fowl’s ways, I can’t be the only one.

A reader who was a keen birdwatcher would have spotted it straight off, but so, to be honest, should most readers. A lot of people have been marvelling that plagiarists can get away with it for so long, and speculating that this just shows how few people actually read poetry,. I think it shows how carelessly we sometimes read. And, sometimes, write. I have read prizewinning (and non-plagiarised) poems which got some detail of the landscape or event wrong, not creatively wrong as in changed for the sake of the poem, which is fine, but plain ignorantly wrong, as in importing an animal into an island where it doesn’t exist, or making a plant flower in the wrong season. For any reader who notices this, the poem is ruined, because the writer’s eye can no longer be trusted: we are liars by trade, but you can only give the main narrative verisimilitude if you get the details accurate. W S Gilbert was dead right about that. The kind of writer who dismisses such errors as unimportant is, I suspect, also in thrall to the “personal story” notion. His poem isn’t really about the event or environment where it’s set; it’s all about him, and as long as he gets himself right, he thinks the details don’t matter. But they do, or they would, if we always read as attentively as we ought. My current excuse is that for months I had been reading books for a shortlist, as closely as I could, and I'd let myself relax as a result. Mea culpa.

Cock-up: no conspiracy

Hm. Am in two minds about this article. On the one hand, I agree with him about the poem. I thought it was awful too, for the reasons given and for others (hate the jog-trot, nursery-rhyme rhythms) and couldn't fathom what the judges saw in it. (Mind you, like all the other unsuccessful entrants I'm probably biased.) I particularly identify with the caustic but fair comment: "The broken jar of cherries which spreads its juice everywhere makes our poet think of 'the shame and surrender of the refugee'. I don't think he thought (or saw) anything of the kind. He thought, shit, the cherry jar is broken, that's what he thought, and it is a cardinal rule of good writing that you don't try and make the reader believe something that is obviously untrue."

On the other hand, I'm not sure I like the idea of competition judges being told to "now tell us in words we can believe in why this poem won" and having their decisions, as subjective no doubt as anyone else's, minutely analysed. Unless, of course, there were any suspicion of impropriety, ie rewarding one's mates. I don't believe that to be the case here, perhaps because I know one of the judges personally and do not doubt her probity, though I certainly don't share the poetic taste that chose this poem. I hope the phrase "words we can believe" wasn't intended to cast doubt on the judges' motives, but if not, it is ill-chosen. I suppose judges ought to be prepared to defend their decisions, and where there are only two, one must assume they were both enamoured of the poem. But there's an aggressive tone to this article (though it's extremely incisive and accurate, IMO) that might, I think, put people off doing what is honestly quite a time-consuming job in the first place.