Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 38

Amazon: working hard to make reviews less helpful

I'd already heard about Amazon deleting book reviews for no other reason than that they were written by authors - not the authors of the books under review, just authors in general. It's being done on the ground that they are potentially "people with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product". Clearly, this is an attempt to combat cases, recently highlighted, where authors have either puffed their own books or trashed those of rivals, under assumed names (and it is in the anonymity that the problem really lies: if Amazon insisted on people using only one posting account and that in their real name, it couldn't happen). But according to one of the comments under this article they are also going after reviews that have been published on reviewers' own blogs, on the basis of their exclusion of "reviews that [...] have been previously published elsewhere" (see their guidelines) Apart from being a heavy-handed response, this is a brilliant way to diminish the quality of Amazon reviewing at a stroke; some of their best reviewers are authors and literary bloggers, which is hardly surprising. If you're an author who does reviews on Amazon, don't link your review profile to your author profile in any way; this seems to trigger their response.

Review of The Obsidian Mirror, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Hodder 2012

Catherine Fisher's many fans will be delighted to hear that her latest, The Obsidian Mirror, is the start of a sequence. Fisher works differently, I think, in standalone books and sequences. The standalones, like Crown of Acorns, Darkhenge and Corbenic, tend to focus on some deep-seated trauma in the young protagonist's mind; he or she will, via the medium of fantasy, find some way of living with reality. The journey is essentially a foray through an individual mind. In the sequences, Fisher can show her immense craft at world-building (as in the two Incarceron novels, where a misguided attempt to halt change and development has resulted in a world of fake surfaces and hidden realities rather like a film set). In these sequences, although the protagonist will still have his/her own issues to work out, there is also a whole universe of equally fascinating minor characters with their own journeys, sometimes parallel, sometimes interlocking. They are already emerging here as they did in The Book of the Crow, her last work on this scale, and I'm already particularly invested in Molly, a Victorian street urchin of immense character and resourcefulness, of whom we shall surely see more in the next volume.

The workings of time have always been a fascination of Fisher's; in Corbenic, Cal gets off at the wrong station and finds himself in Arthurian times, while in Crown of Acorns three stories, from different times in history, run parallel. But this is the first book of hers I recall in which the possible mechanics of time travel have played any part. The mirror of the title is a way of travelling in time, and both a man, Venn, and a boy, Jake, are trying to use it for personal ends, while another character, from a different time, is trying to destroy it for altruistic reasons. At least, that's how things seem now; anyone acquainted with Fisher's ability to produce plot twists that are both credible and surprising will be wary of coming to any definite conclusion on motives for some time yet.

Another Fisher signature which I am personally delighted to see reappearing is her fascination with cold. Anyone who recalls the gripping imaginative prose of the Snow-Walker trilogy will be happy to find themselves back in the depths of winter, and these descriptions are among the most memorable passages in the book: the moon "a silver fingernail through the branches", the snow that "fell in slow diagonals, twirling out of the dark". One of the most striking moments is when the wood-dwellers emerge:

The Shee were flocking from the wood. They carried bells and chimes, many beat drums and the deep throbbing rhythm made starlings rise from the trees and call to each other across the sky. The snow had stopped falling; now it lay deep and still and the clouds were clearing. High above, like a dust of diamonds on black velvet, the stars were coming out, sherds and slivers of brilliance, eerie over the frozen Wood and the blue-white hummocks of the lawns.

As usual, the narrative impulse was so strong that I devoured the thing in a ridiculous hurry and will need to re-read. But I'm already completely hooked. The sequence is currently set to comprise hopefully four books, possibly three. The more the better, I say.

Oh no, not again....

Oh look, male commentator discovers fanfic and explains it to the rest of us... again..... Yawn.

Virtual Legacies

This (by solicitor Louise Restell) is a fascinating article, perhaps especially to writers, and the more I read it, the less I think there are any easy answers to most of the questions it raises.

Most writers probably don't give a thought to what might happen to their FB profile when they die, despite the fact that it may contain fascinating background information on their methods, not to mention even more fascinating spats with fellow writers. All the stuff, in fact, that once might have been available to biographers or literary critics in diaries or letters - only most of this will not be similarly available, for though FB will "memorialise" a profile by providing space for an obituary and allowing Facebook friends to leave posts on the wall for remembrance, it will delete all status updates. (I don't know what would happen to comments by the dead person on the status updates of others, and it's an interesting thought, for removing them would inevitably misrepresent the discussion in question.)

This may not matter a damn to the deceased, but it does potentially matter to literary critics, and indeed historians in general, if we're talking of users other than writers. We probably record more of our lives than ever our pre-internet ancestors did, but ironically their sepia photographs, Mass Observation Project diaries, rolls of cine film and sheaves of letters tied in ribbon may still be there when our online diaries, Flickr albums and YouTube videos have long vanished in the ether.

It may of course also matter to friends and relatives who would like to keep these memories of the departed, to read through their status updates as you would a diary. As far as I can see, they can't, unless the whole lot is backed up somewhere else, which may be a grief to them. One could, as the article suggests, leave one's passwords handy with one's will, but the surviving relatives may not be in a state to do much about it for some time, which could be too late.

The alternative scenario, of course, is when the deceased didn't want their nearest and dearest to have access to their online persona, which may not have been the same as their real-life one. Both FB and Yahoo refuse to provide relatives with the password of a dead person, and the article gives instances of relatives challenging this. Though one can understand why, I tend to agree with FB and Yahoo (for a wonder) that the dead have a right to privacy. "After all", says the article, "if you’d written it all down in a journal or letter there would be hard copies for your survivors to find". Well yes, but you might well have intended to destroy them if you'd had time, and in the case of online material you might not have thought you needed to. Not giving your relatives your password strikes me as the equivalent of encrypting a written diary; it makes your wish for privacy fairly clear.

It's also possible, if you are a writer, that you may not want to remove material altogether from the web, but just to keep it from the view of your family. I'm thinking here of some fan fiction writers who work pseudonymously, and in particular of one I knew online, though I never met her. By what I could deduce of her real-life personality from interaction on forums etc, she was a rather conventional middle-aged married lady of, indeed, quite conservative views on most things. Her writing, however, was surprisingly and graphically sexual and violent; it was nothing much out of the way in her online writing community, but if her family, after her death (which was somewhat sudden and unexpected) had been able to access her passwords and pseudonyms and discovered this other side to her, I can't imagine they would have been other than shocked, not so much by the material as by the fact that they hadn't known her as well as they thought. Some fan fiction writers indeed leave passwords and other information with friends in the community, precisely so that after they die, their writing can stay available to the community but not to their families, who never knew of it. The writing isn't always of a violent or sexual nature either; it is just a side of themselves that they wanted to share only with a particular group of people.

This may well also be the case with the poor lad mentioned in the article, who committed suicide and whose parents want access to his online accounts. I can see why they feel it would give them an insight into his state of mind, but it's an insight he may not have wished them to have. I'm mighty averse to the idea that Yahoo or FB should be forced to give out passwords in such cases or, I think, in any case, but as I said, I don't think there are many easy answers here.

I do think folk with a lot of stuff online, like photos, videos etc, should think about backing it up, unless of course their motto is "après moi, le déluge". As for social media, it's easy to say that one should remember it is a fleeting medium and that anything you really want to preserve needs to be, at the very least, in a more secure online space like a personal blog. But in practice, you can't tell which casual post will turn into a truly fascinating and illuminating debate. A great deal of interaction between writers via social media is going to be lost. You may say, so was conversation in literary salons, but in fact the best of it was often recorded later in diary or letter form. Does that happen now? Is an admiring retweet any more likely to survive than its original?

Goodreads and the friends requests

This is a post for fellow Goodreads users who, like me, are fed up with the nuisance of unsolicited emails saying "be my friend on Goodreads" (and I know there are such users because they've been complaining on the same forums I've been using). I use Goodreads to put book reviews on. Sometimes I read those of others, but it's possible to "follow" people's reviews without doing the whole friending thing and I was never into that - FB and Twitter are enough. A few people I knew well became friends, and that was fine. Now and again someone else would ask - again, mostly folk I knew. At least one, whom I didn't know, turned out to be a colossal bore who was only on Goodreads to promote her own work, but that could happen anywhere.

Friends requests were not a pest, because they were rare. Suddenly they are anything but - on a bad day I'll get half a dozen emails and I know others have been finding the same. I got in touch with a nice lady at customer services called Claire. She advised making sure the account wasn't associated with any other, like Facebook, and setting a "secret question" that potential requesters had to answer. I duly did all this, but unfortunately the "secret question" only applies to anyone who doesn't already know your email address, and mine needs to be public for work reasons. So it's made no real odds. I also tried saying on my profile that I didn't do the friends thing and would ignore all requests. That didn't work; people clearly don't read the profile before firing off their request.

I'd asked Claire if there was any way of just opting out of all friends requests. There isn't but she gave some hope that they might think about it. After another slew of emails, I've asked her again if there's any likelihood of this. If she comes back and says no, I'm going to delete the account. That'll mean all the reviews go, but most are elsewhere, either on my blog or on Amazon.

I'd be sorry to do this, because the more reviews are out there, the better for writers, and most of mine are, deliberately, of stuff that isn't getting much reviewed elsewhere. But it won't be worth the hassle unless they can make it possible to opt out of these requests. Since I know there are others having this problem, I'll let you know what response I get from Goodreads. In the meantime, if you too want a way out of this nuisance, I'd suggest emailing and telling them so, because they do seem to listen and reply.

Review of Happiness Comes From Nowhere, by Shauna Gilligan, pub. Ward Wood Publishing 2012

I often wonder where Irish debut novelists get the confidence to proceed, with all those fearsomely eminent predecessors standing behind them. But they do, quite regularly, and always seem to have something fresh to say. I should mention at the outset that I'm coming at this review from a rather odd place; I saw this novel in draft, before it had completely decided where it was going, and now, reading the finished novel, I can still sometimes see the ghost-novel behind it, an experience usually reserved for authors.
It is set mainly in Dublin, and that pushy, energetic city very much elbows its way into the cast of characters – in this, if in few other ways, it reminds me of the last Dublin-centred Irish debut novel I read, Trevor Byrne's Ghosts and Lightning. Both have central characters, but are also essentially ensemble productions, in which the wider life of Dublin is constantly present. This is perhaps more obvious in Gilligan's novel because it is told through multiple voices. Indeed there are several moments when we hear someone describing a person and suddenly realise it is a character we already knew, or thought we did, seen from yet another angle. I find this a fascinating technique, constantly reminding us that nobody is of a piece, or unchanging, or comes across the same way to any two other people. It does mean the reader needs to stay alert; this is definitely a novel that can be enjoyed on first reading, but only if you keep your wits about you, as you would have to in a real-life conversation, on which I often felt I was eavesdropping.

We first meet Dirk, the novel's protagonist, trying to commit suicide for reasons that are not then clear either to us or, possibly, to him. For the question from which the book takes its title is, or so it seems to me, what is it that causes happiness? Why is Dirk sometimes experiencing moments of pure happiness and at other times plunged in despair, when there does not seem to be that much difference in the conditions of his life? And if one could find what causes it, would there be a way of inducing it?

These are questions which don't perhaps crop up in novels as often as one might expect. Which is odd when you think that most of us have been in similar situations to Dirk's at the summit of Croagh Patrick, outside the moment of pure happiness his girlfriend Angela is in:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Isn't this just perfect?"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Before you can reply, she's thrown her arms around you. "You know, I can't think of another time when I felt so happy. But it's more than that. I'm just…. overjoyed. Me and you and this mountain". She laughs, throwing her head back, her hair tousled, tangled and beautiful.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Me, you and this mountain," you repeat, wanting to touch her hair but instead you look past her.

It would be unlike this novel to suggest any easy answers to this question, though its protagonists certainly try some that can be guaranteed not to work, like drugs, casual sex and alcohol. Various cryptic characters appear in a Thomas Mann sort of way from time to time – a street entertainer in Rome, a barfly in Dublin – but though they have their own recipes, none is as pithy or as accurate as Angela's mother, with her advice, "It'll come back. Happiness always does." What comes over, I think, is that there is no sure way of bringing happiness on; all we can and indeed must do is recognise it when we see it, make the most of its transient presence and remember that it will indeed be back.

It is there, on and off, throughout this novel, via Gilligan's dry humour and rich cast of minor characters (Aunty Sheila the Obsessive Cake Baker is particularly memorable). Yet in the end this is a serious novel, for the unpredictability and elusiveness of happiness is a serious theme. The more credit to her that "serious" never equals "heavy going".

Review of Lightning Beneath the Sea, by Grahame Davies (Seren 2012)

This is the first poetry collection in English by a writer who is already noted for both poetry and prose in Welsh. Some of the poems in it were composed in English, some first composed in Welsh and then translated by the poet.



There's a poem in it called "Sweet Peas" , which I want to discuss in some detail, not only because I like it very much but because it completely avoids certain dangers he doesn't wholly avoid elsewhere. It is an iambic conversation-poem in the manner of Robert Frost, quite deliberately, since it deals with a packet of seeds bought at Frost's house in Vermont and replanted in Wales, so far without success. The one detail I would alter about this poem is the way it's set out on the page. Where a line begins in voice, I don't think it needs indenting, and where the voice changes mid-line I would drop the line and indent the next beyond it (as indeed Frost does), so that, eg, the lines

striving towards the sunlight.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "It's a shame",
I said, remembering how, six months ago

would read

striving towards the sunlight.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "It's a shame",
I said, remembering how, six months ago

But other than that, this poem strikes me as a triumph. It is iambic in that ambling conversational Frost style that seems so natural as to be unnoticeable, and its underlying intent is similarly understated. It shows without obtrusively telling, as when the man suggests reasons for the seeds' failure:

"Maybe they just don't travel very well.
Perhaps the earth is colder over here."
She doesn't answer. On the greenhouse door
the paint has blistered in last summer's sun.

There is a strong implication that what is really not flourishing is the relationship, but this is never made explicit, even at the end:

"We'll leave them here and if they come, they come."
A cloud has stepped between us and the light.
We close the door to keep the warmth inside.
"Another week, perhaps…"
"Perhaps", she says.

The sombre mood of this poem, with its doubtful hint of last-chances at the end, seems to me beautifully done, and the technique is handled as surely as the emotion –is indeed part of what creates it. The iambic pentameter suits both the poem's mood and the Frost-homage, and the openness of the ending reflects an assurance that trusts the reader to experience the poem without being guided by signposts.

There are other poems here that do this – "Quarry" and "Goodbye", among them, have the same preservation of mystery, the sense that not all the back-story has been spelled out, or needs to be. In others, I think he does tell too much. The first two verses of "Remembrance of Things Past" are plain unnecessary, the sort of preliminary explanation one might put in a reading, or indeed a lecture; the poem would work far better if it started at verse 3. More often, I think his last lines seek to close things off too tidily; you can sometimes see them striving to make a point. "Hoodie", until the end, is tense and sharply observed:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp his shadowed cheeks unlined
but somehow not because he was not old
but more as though he had been young too long,
like for a lifetime, for eternity.

But the end,

His hand comes up, as if on puppet strings,
and mine goes out and takes it, and we're one.

feels like an attempt at a Meaningful Moment that doesn't come off. It isn't really earned for a start; the gesture comes out of nowhere and feels unconvincing.

As is clear from the quotes above, Davies has a real flair for coining sharp, pithy phrases that get to the nub of the matter. He is a thoughtful, meditative, serious poet and well worth reading. What I think he most needs to be is less tidy. Peter Finch's description of these poems as "the meeting of form with freedom" is only sometimes true. Sometimes the prevalence, not to mention the regularity, of Davies's favoured iambic pentameter becomes oppressive. This is especially so in his villanelles, the tidiest form in the world and potentially the deadest – the end is, after all, predetermined from the first three lines on. I must admit villanelles seldom work for me unless the poet subverts them somehow – "Song for Samhain" does it to some extent by varying the line length, but mostly his use of this form is nothing if not conventional. He is really skilled with form, but I would like to see him use it more as Paul Muldoon and Paul Henry do, with their disguised sestinas and variant rondeaux that you only notice on a second or third reading.

This is a good, interesting collection, but I think there will be a better yet to come from this poet, one which manages not to look as if it's trying quite so hard.When it does work, his formal command and pithy pay-off lines can be superb, nowhere more so than in "Transmitter Stations":

Imagine what it must be like to work
in one of these. The gate locked shut behind,
the solitude – not loneliness – the shifts,
the cups of tea to mark the passing hours;
inside, electric warmth, outside, the wind.
And all the time, sending your message out.
Ideal, really, when you think of it.

The Place Where You Aren't: writers and displacement

Now and then, someone organises a scholarly conference on the importance to writers of a sense of place (generally in some place unreachable by public transport). But the other reason I never end up going is that, with a few exceptions, or apparent exceptions, the writers who fascinate me do not have a sense of place so much as a sense of displacement.

Though I think this may always have been so, I became conscious of it while teaching on the University of Glamorgan's Masters in Writing degree when I was successively tutor to three poets, all émigrées to the UK from the USA – Tamar Yoseloff, Karen Annesen and Barbara Marsh. What struck me about all of them was that they observed the place where they now lived differently; they noticed and highlighted things that for a native-born poet might not have stood out, and over and over, their sense of the place where they were was informed by their equally keen sense of that other place where they had once been, but now were not.

A perfectly adjusted organism would be silent
- E M Forster: A Passage to India

Most teachers of writing have had students ask the question "why is poetry so unhappy?" particularly with reference to love poetry, and have replied with some variant on Forster's remark. The very act of writing suggests something out of kilter in the writer's relationship to his world and it's notoriously difficult to write a happy love poem well, simply because there seems no occasion, nothing wrong enough to write about. I would suggest that the same may be true of place-poems: poets who are at home, happy in their place and in no danger of losing it, have no occasion to write about it and if they do, are not liable to write very memorably. (Someone is about to object "but what about so-and-so the famed, rooted, brilliant place-poet?" but bear with me, we shall come to him presently.) Just as love poems tend to be most memorable and successful when they concern love unconsummated, disappointed or recalled from the past, so a sense of place becomes keenest and most powerful when the place it relates to is not possessed but desired, not present but recalled, not here but there. "I wish I were in Carrickfergus", as the old folk-song says. And why is the place in this Arthur Waley translation of an anonymous first-century BC Chinese poem so haunting?

In a narrow road where there was not room to pass
My carriage met the carriage of a young man,
And while his axle was touching my axle
In the narrow road I asked him where he lived.
"The place where I live is easy to find,
Easy to find and hard to forget.
The gates of my house are built of yellow gold,
The hall of my house is paved with white jade.
On the hall table flagons of wine are set,
I have summoned to serve me dancers of Han-t'an.
In the middle of the courtyard grows a cassia tree,
And candles on its branches flaring away in the night"

("Meeting in the Road": 170 Chinese Poems).

Even if we do not happen to know, as a Chinese reader of the time would, that in Chinese myth there is a cassia tree on the moon, this strange encounter in the midst of a busy city is irresistibly beckoning, and surely it is because the place is elsewhere, the mysterious young man or god not surrounded by the beauty he describes but somehow exiled from the place so hard to forget. "Ich am of Irlaunde", says his cousin in the Middle English 13th-century poem, inviting us to come and dance in that "holy londe" where he or she clearly is not.

Now dispossessed of the great sea
- Charles Causley: "Sorel Point"

Charles Causley spent most of his life rooted in the Cornish village of Launceston, not of his own volition; like many a child whose father died in the Great War, he later found himself providing emotional and financial support to a widowed mother. But if the first world war eventually confined him, the second temporarily made a globetrotter of him, for he joined the navy and saw service all over the world, for six years which were to become the keynote of his poetry. He lived into his mid-eighties, but decades after that six years, his imagery, vocabulary, subject matter were still haunted by his time in the navy and by a constantly expressed longing for the sea. "Return to Cornwall" optimistically begins

I think no longer of the antique city
Of Pompey and the red-haired Alexander

- but in the next verse, in the midst of an attempt to evoke Cornwall, "the children build their harbour in the meadow", a parenthesis creeps in:

(O the cypress trees of Mahomed Ali Square!)

The fact that his heart was elsewhere, on the great sea of which he felt himself dispossessed and in the places where it had taken him, did not prevent him observing very clearly the place where he found himself; it never seems to. One might suppose that a writer hankering after the place where he was not would find his attention distracted from the one where he was, but if anything the opposite seems to happen, rather as it does with children growing up bilingual, whose progress with language acquisition is if anything helped by learning to think in two tongues at once. In Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote both his unforgettable evocation of "The Beach of Falesa":

I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting, but still broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled like a diamond. The land breeze blew in our faces, and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla: other things besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me sneezing

and Catriona, in which the streets of Edinburgh come to life as if he had walked them the day before. The narrator of "The Beach of Falesa", Wiltshire the copra-trader, is himself a displaced person. A wanderer like his creator in an environment and culture that did not breed him, he belongs nowhere in particular until marriage and parenthood root him. At the end of the story he is living with his Polynesian wife, having given up on his dream of returning "home" and opening a pub, and the only worry on his mind is how his half-Polynesian children are going to find a place to belong in the world.

Home is made for coming from, for dreams of going to,
Which with any luck will never come true.
- Alan J Lerner: "Wand'rin' Star"

It would of course have been a disaster had Mr Wiltshire indeed gone "home" and opened his pub. For there never was a truer word growled than by Mr Marvin: going back to a once-loved place after a long time away is a recipe for disappointment (and some fine poems), and this is because places, at least as far as people are concerned, exist in time and context. However much we may love a place for its landscape, its light, or anything else intrinsic, it will also, in our minds, be the place where we grew up, or fell in love, or were happy in our work, and we can no more return to that place than we can step twice into the same river, as Heraclitus puts it; time and the current have moved on. Any change in the place that we recall – a missing tree, a new building – is likely to strike us as a change for the worse, simply because when it was in its former state we were younger, which for any species subject to death is a good enough reason to prefer the old to the new. I think this can even be true of rooted writers, for he who stays in one place all his life is eventually liable to find himself mentally living in the version of it which he knew from his childhood or youth. George Mackay Brown was such a writer, who regarded even the advent of a nearby Co-op as a potential disaster for his beloved Stromness. His fictional name for it was Hamnavoe, which had been its name in Viking times, and the undoubted keenness of his vision of the Stromness where he lived is shot through with an elegiac longing for the Hamnavoe that had gone before his time: even this most apparently rooted of writers was in his way an exile.

And it may be worse if the place doesn't change at all, for we shall be the more conscious of the changes in ourselves, like A E Housman, ruefully reflecting on the fair where once in his youth he stood and looked at things he couldn't afford:

Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can.
The pence are here, and here's the fair,
But where's the lost young man?

In his later years, freed of responsibilities, Charles Causley took to globetrotting again and wrote of his travels in Canada, Europe, Australia. And how did he get to all these places? Why, he flew… granted, some of them were long-haul trips but he was in no hurry. I think he was cannily avoiding any return to the sea, the place from which exile had so inspired him. This place, after all, was not just "the sea" but the sea in the early1940s, in wartime, from the point of view of a sailor in the Royal Navy, and to that place, and that version of himself, that lost young man, he could not return.

Therefore when a person says, I am well and wish to be well, or I am rich and wish to be rich, and I desire simply to have what I have - to him we shall reply: "You, my friend, having wealth and health and strength, want to have the continuance of them; […]. And when you say, I desire that which I have and nothing else, is not your meaning that you want to retain what you now have in the future? […]Then, said Socrates, he and every one who desires, desires that which he has not already, and which is future and not present, and which he has not, and is not, and of which he is in want?"
- Plato: The Symposium

I suggested earlier that lost or unrequited love produces more powerful writing than the fulfilled kind, and that displacement is similarly more productive than rootedness. Yet there are writers who celebrate fulfilled love, and rootedness in a loved place. I think it is Plato who gives us the key to how they manage that. For when I said "poets who are at home, happy in their place and in no danger of losing it, have no real occasion to write about it" I was surely, in the italicised words, posing a condition that can't exist. The ending of the love story, "and they got married and lived happily ever after" is incomplete: it should read "and lived happily ever after until one of them died". In the same way, we are all not only in danger of losing the place we live in but utterly certain to, unless we have found the secret of eternal life.

No poet is more conscious of this than Louise Glück, and none has a keener sense of the world she lives in, for it is the bitterest of ironies that the more sensitive you are to the beauty of the world, the more agonising is the thought of losing it. If Causley was unusual in that his beloved locality was the entire ocean, she is even more so, for hers is the planet: which particular bit she inhabited would make no odds to the anguish of the narrative voice in "October", so conscious of each manifestation of beauty

Sunrise. A film of moisture
on each living thing. Pools of cold light
formed in the gutters

and simultaneously conscious that

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

(Averno)

In "Arboretum", from The Seven Ages, she confronts head-on our longing to stay for ever in the loved place

We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger[…]
merely wishing to linger, to be, to be here

and the logical consequence of this apparently harmless take-up of space by those who ask

so little of the world; small things seemed to us
immense wealth. merely to smell once more the early roses
in the arboretum; we asked
so little, and we claimed nothing. And the young
withered nevertheless.

But knowing a thing is so makes it no easier to accept; it is a condition of humanity that growing to love the temporary, which "place", for us, will always be, brings grief.

I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me
to love the world, making it impossible
to turn away completely, to shut it out completely
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp ever again-
it is everywhere; when I close my eyes,
birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses:
you mean to take it away

- "Vespers": The Wild Iris

In the end, I think that to be completely rooted and at ease in a place, a writer would need to live in the moment, with little or no sense of that place's context in time, its past and future - or indeed his own. Such a writer Constantine Cavafy emphatically was not: when he walks the streets of early twentieth-century Alexandria, he plainly wouldn't be surprised to bump into Mark Antony or the Emperor Julian round the corner, for their times and their versions of Alexandria are as real and vivid to him as his own. Two of his most famous poems concern a loved place, and at the heart of both is Plato's sense that love is less for what we have than for what we have not. In "The God Abandons Antony", a man's luck and the whole shape of his life are figured in the city, his and Cavafy's own Alexandria, a place and a time fusing into a moment the more precious because it is about to be over, because it is time to "say goodbye to her, Alexandria you are losing". In "Ithaka", the loved place is a memory but also a goal, the home made for coming from and for dreams of going to. And Cavafy's advice is clear: we had better "hope the journey is a long one", for the best thing our dream destination can offer us is the journey there.

Homerslash wins Orange Prize

Madeline Miller's . Leastways I assume it's Homerslash from the description; I haven't read it.

I've been Archived!

To be precise, I now have a recording in the Poetry Archive, that magnificent project started by Andrew Motion, while he was laureate, to record poets reading their own work. (Though I also got to read a bit of George Herbert while doing it, which was immense fun, because they let you read one poem from someone who lived too early to be recorded.) There's a CD, from which you can find sample poems on the web page. Thanks to all concerned.