Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 46

Joke over...

"The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.'

"Certainly," replied Elizabeth -- "there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can."

- Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

I was thinking grumpily the other day that too many people who could quote you Elizabeth's words at the drop of a hat fail to notice that not only does Mr Darcy also have a point; Elizabeth concedes it. Humour can be a good weapon to deflate pomposity and misplaced solemnity, but it can also be used, and often is, to belittle seriousness which was in its proper place and didn't need or deserve belittling. Replying to a serious point in a debate with a joke is a form of putdown; it is saying, in effect, that the point is not worthy of a serious answer. It's also frequently a good way for someone to conceal the fact that they've lost the argument, not to mention a way of being offensive and then avoiding comeback. There's something awfully juvenile about people who, challenged on something they've just said, reply "I was only joking"; it's a bit like ringing a doorbell and running away. And of course the question "where's your sense of humour?", addressed to someone who's just taken legitimate offence at something, is pure playground bullying, a way of putting the victim in the wrong. It may be easier to do in Britain than in most other places, because Brits can easily be made ashamed of seriousness.

(Why yes, this is a little rantlet inspired by someone online, though not in LJ, who's forever saying things like "I was only teasing", and derailing debates that were going somewhere with misplaced "humour"!) Seriousness isn't always either solemn or pompous; sometimes it's just, you know, the way grown-ups talk?

Review of The Brittle Sea: Selected Poems, Paul Henry, Seren 2010, £9.99

This is a selection from Henry's published work since his collection Time Pieces in 1991, plus about 25 new poems written since the publication of Ingrid's Husband in 2007. I'd heard most of these new poems at various readings, and been so impressed by them that I turned to the end of the book first to read them. But don't do this at home unless you already know Henry's work well, because some of these new poems, including the sublime "Penllain", derive part of their powerful, brooding nostalgia from reprising characters who first appeared in earlier work, notably The Milk Thief (Seren 1998). Henry, a musician and songwriter as well as a poet, has always been one for using the techniques of reprise and refrain; there are poems from Ingrid's Husband, like "The Snow Dome" and the section of "Gestures" beginning "I want you close before I go" that are effectively, though unobtrusively, rondeaux, and the whole of "Penllain" is a sort of verbal fugue, with motifs, images and people from the past endlessly shifting and recurring, coming around again as things do. Nightingale Ann, Prydwen Jane, Brown Helen all resurface from The Milk Thief in the new poems; so does Catrin Sands, in a poem heavy with recall, whose recurring, subtly changing lines again have some resemblance to the rondeau:

Catrin Sands, are you still there?
I dreamt about you last night.
You think it's all Brown Helen but it's you
who were pale and thin last night.
And your eyes were brown instead of blue
Catrin Sands, if you're still there.

I suppose the themes that have been constant in Henry's work have been, firstly, the relationships of people to each other and to the places they live in, and secondly, intricately bound up with the first, the passage of time. As far back as "Daylight Robbery", from Captive Audience (Seren 1996), a 7-year-old boy's first "grown-up" haircut becomes the occasion for a meditation both on parenthood and on time passing, changing people and their relationships:

All the way back to the car
a stranger picks himself out
in a glass-veiled identity parade.

Turning a corner
his hand slips from mine
like a final, forgotten strand
snipped from its lock.

Through his next three collections, this sense of time altering relationships and perceptions became stronger and more brooding, and it also became bound up with place in that – to over-simplify somewhat – Newport, where the poet then lived, came to figure the present, while his childhood home Aberystwyth was emblematic not only of the past but of all the alternative turns time might have taken. Several noted poets hail and have hailed from the unenticing urban landscape of Newport, but I can't think of any who have brought it alive as vividly as Henry does in his "Newport East" group and the long poem "Between Two Bridges", in which he walks through the town by night with his younger self:

I notice the river. barely a slough of itself in the cracked mud–
as if the moon had taken a long straw to the years and sucked.

He pulls away. The wind puts its lips to an arcade.
A seagull on a barber's pole waits to open its blades.

Yet at the same time, Aberystwyth and the past, or a present that never materialised, were becoming an ever more powerful presence. "College Library" merits quoting in full, because it exemplifies not only this elegiac, what-if strand in Henry but his exactness with words and images, a quality of almost clinical observation that paradoxically makes a terrific emotional impact:

The book no one else took out
since stamped on 9.10.80
when the Jack Russell froze on its zebra
four stripes ahead of its zimmer
and a wave held back its confession
and a tongue hovered an inch from its cone
and the lifeboat got anchored to its wake
and a finger in the Bay View's window
accused the horizon… is still there.

He splits it, gently, its shell
back to the light. They take a breath
as swimmers surfacing might.
Their fingertips drift, collide
on lines once whispered by heart.
He snaps it shut again, for good.
The esplanade clock chimes twenty-five….

Small lines appear at her eyes, which he loves.
His hair comes away in her hand when they kiss.
Someone says Sh – a pair of heels on wood
near where the sun falls open at their feet.

Despite the underlying melancholy, there is a humour about that Jack Russell, and it would be wrong to overlook Henry's facility in that direction; even the final poem, an elegy for his friend the artist Tony Goble, is shot through with humour, as befits that eccentric gent (whose work, by the way, supplies the cover picture).
When I think of some of the almost unsayable, and certainly unmemorable, prose in lines that passes for free verse, and of some highly praised, competition-winning poems that resemble determinedly quirky exercises rather than an attempt to articulate anything important enough to need saying, I am at a loss to understand why this poet, who not only concerns himself with themes that would resonate with most readers but has the verbal and musical skill to make them resonate, is not more widely known and admired. When, recently, I had to name 15 authors who were important to me, he came just below Louise Gluck and Edwin Morgan, which still feels about right.

Return

S'pose I could send this to a mag, but hell, that'd take ages and I wrote it for TODAY!

Return

What the earth takes, it gives again: look,
do not fathers, brothers, sons rise

from the ground, their eyes shaded, in case
they hanker for the dark? Do not

marriages restart from this minute,
like a stopped clock set going again,

are not hasty words, that might have been
last words, now air? Each tenant, his leasehold

on light renewed, is given back the world,
we too: how not, even though we know

few are paroled, none pardoned. Just now
they stand for all who were not granted leave

and will not be, as if indeed love
could go down deep enough to bring us back.

A great idea for Christmas presents

Lawrence Sail is a British poet of some renown, who for 20 years has been writing poems for the Christmas season that he's sent as cards to friends. Now he has collected them in an illustrated book which he is marketing entirely on behalf of the charity Trusts for African Schools, which supports some of the poorest schools in Africa. I've a friend a headmaster in Kenya, who testifies that it's a charity which uses its money wisely and to good account.

Lawrence's poems are thoughtful, delicate, very observing of nature and with a quiet unfussy originality of language. I've just got the book and it's lovely. Here's the opening poem:

Proofs

Delete leaves, the hum of long evenings, light.
Change to bold the grip of frost, black nights.
Rearrange forest gales, seas steep as stairs.
Italicise the stinging slopes of rain.
Stet the murderous world, heartland of despair.
Indent: in the beginning, begin again.

Insert an asterisk over Bethlehem.
Replace damaged characters with wise men.
Substitute stable for inn, manger for bed.
Transpose caviar and crust, fish and hook.
Realign hope, cherish the hungry and the dead.
Print: weigh in your hand spring's budding book.

Some of the poems have an overtly Christmas theme, others are more generally wintry, but all have that delicate, surprising language, those slopes of rain... What could make a better gift for someone who loves books, or someone who wants to do some good to people other than manufacturers and retailers over the season? As the blurb on the back, written by none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu, says: "Lawrence Sail's poetry is beautifully pictorial, evocative and deeply thoughtful. I am glad that this collection will help support the education of children in Africa."

The book (£9.99 + p&p) can be bought from Enitharmon and amazon.uk - I daresay Amazons elsewhere in the world will also have it. G'wan, make the Archbish a little happier!

It isn't just what you mean, it's also what I hear

I can hardly credit that someone (in another place) is still saying "but I don't mean anything insulting by the word 'poetess'; I just use it as a useful way of indicating gender, and intention is what matters". No, darlin', because communication happens in two stages: when the words leave your mouth or pen and when they enter my eyes or ears. Whatever esswords like poetess and authoress may mean to you, Mr Man, to a woman they indicate abnormality: that poet=male and woman poet is something so odd and untypical that it needs a special word. It also indicates patronising insult, because it has constantly been used so. A poetess is Patience Strong, someone who writes verses on greetings cards; it is not Louise Glück. An authoress is Barbara Cartland, not Hilary Mantel. And when others frequently use words that way, you don't get to say "but I'm different; I didn't intend to be insulting so you mustn't assume I did". Because words take their colour from how they are generally used. "Idiot" and "cretin" were once neutral medical descriptions; they are now insults, whoever uses them and with whatever intent. That guy who got shot lately while waving a gun in the general direction of the police; maybe he meant no harm. They couldn't know, so they judged his intent by what they'd seen of others in similar circumstances, and so shall I.
</rant>

Review of The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver, Faber & Faber 2009

If you've had enough of contemporary novels about nothing that matters very much, with tedious or dislikeable protagonists you wouldn't care if you never met again, with posturing authors anxious to show off their stylistic brilliance at every opportunity instead of getting on with the story and, above all, novels that don't so much end as peter unsatisfyingly out along with the author's ideas and impetus, I suggest you try this one a.s.a.p. and don't be daunted by its doorstep size. The intrinsic interest of the story and its two main narrative voices is such that on a first read you won't even be conscious of time passing, much less of the stunningly artful structure that underpins it.
What we read is a collection of notebooks and associated documents, collated by Violet Brown, amanuensis to Harrison Shepherd, novelist, and stored by her in 1958 for 50 years. She does this because she is incensed at how her employer was misrepresented in his lifetime and wants to put the record straight for the future. Harrison, born in 1916, is half-American and half-Mexican; brought up partly in both countries, his life meshes with the class struggle of the twenties and thirties. His childhood is spent in a Mexico constantly lurching from revolution to reaction and back; as a teenager in the US, he witnesses the massacre by bayonets, bullets and gas of the Bonus Army encampment of Great War veterans protesting about their missing war bonuses, and how the press misinforms people about what happened. Later, back in Mexico, he joins the chaotic household of artist-politician Diego Rivera and painter Frida Kahlo, which is how he comes to know Lev Trotsky and witness his murder - again massively misrepresented by the press in America, where at the time the government was anxious to be on good terms with Stalin. Traumatised by this event, he returns to the US in the 40s and becomes a successful postwar novelist. But as the US becomes more insular and paranoid, his leftwing past becomes a problem.

Misrepresentation of the truth is a major motif, as in this key conversation between Violet and Harrison when she warns him that reporters take his reticence as a licence to make up what he won't tell them:

"When they have nothing, they fill in. If you don't stop them, they fill in more. It's like you've agreed to it. To their way of thinking, saying nothing is the same as agreeing. […] and taking the Fifth means you're guilty."

"Whatever they may think, it does not. A blank space on a form, the missing page, a hole in your knowledge of something – it's still some real thing. It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want".

A running joke about Harrison's writing – and he is a dry, witty and attractive narrative voice – is that his publisher will never agree to his proposed titles, always substituting something more commercial which, to the author's mind, says less about the book. Kingsolver clearly would not have been willing to negotiate about "The Lacuna" as a title; it is crucial, as that conversation shows. "Lacuna" has several meanings, including a geographical one vital to the novel's structure, but the literary meaning is a gap in a documentary record. In Harrison's notebooks there are two lacunae, two missing books. One is burned, unread, by Violet on his orders. It's possible, from hints in other notebooks, to make a fair guess at what it contained, but Violet, mindful of his insistence that people cannot be completely known, avoids doing so. The other book, from Harrison's childhood, goes accidentally missing for years; he himself in fact never recovers it. But it resurfaces later, to be collated in its chronological order with the rest by Violet, with an archivist's proper explanatory note on the circumstances. This book, therefore, is never a lacuna to the reader but only to her; when it is found, many things she had not understood become clear to her.

Violet's narrative voice is as engaging as Harrison's, for her humour, her archaic mountain idiom and her intellectual and moral rigour. When an exhibition of abstract art falls foul of an increasingly insular Congress, Harrison's explanation is "it made them uneasy". But Violet's logic is more forensic, and more uncompromising: "They didn't say uneasy. They said un-American. I can't see that. If an American paints it, then it's American, isn't it?"

If a Great American Novel is meant to show how America became what it is, then this is it. It's also a lot more, a highly entertaining, thoughtful, beautifully structured narrative. Above all, it has, as so many novels do not, a truly strong, satisfying ending, that comes organically from the book, is totally right for it and yet still managed to take me by surprise. A genuinely worthwhile experience.

Review of Flatlands by Victor Tapner, Salt Publishing 2010

Find me in your own time
find me in your own face

- "Thames Idol"

If you're going to set a long cycle of poems, which is what this collection consists of, in the East Anglia of the two thousand years from the late Stone Age to the Roman invasion, then it is clearly important above all that you do it in a way modern readers can relate to: we must indeed be able to find these people and their concerns still present in ourselves, while still seeing them in their context, not ours. Tapner himself says he wants the poems to be able to "stand as metaphors of ourselves expressed through universal themes – things like bereavement, love and infidelity, political oppression and violence" and in this he surely succeeds. Take "Villagers", whose ageing speaker has a touch of rheumatism. The nettle balm which gives relief might come from a bottle nowadays, but the "mutton fingers" and "thick knuckles" that will no longer obey their owner stir a sympathetic and instantly recognisable frustration in us, and the speaker's summing-up of his/her situation

I squat in the sun
outside the hut

by the river path
where I used to run

is too universal not to resonate in any age. Superficially their surroundings, knowledge and experiences differ from ours; in essentials we are alike. The "Arrow Maker" practises an arcane craft, but his pride in it is familiar to any contemporary craftsman; the hunters in "Aurochs" are stalking a prey that we can only ever imagine, but their contained fear and excitement are visceral and unchanging. Sometimes, indeed, they remind us that we still live in the same landscape: in a time when flooding and coastal erosion become more of a possibility each year, the East Anglian "Tidal Dwellers" are not a million miles away:

High tides
salt
the hay pens

slowly
our houses
drown

Being able to create this empathy for his protagonists and intimate sense of their landscape is of course dependent on words, and in this poem he uses one-word lines to unusually good effect, always a difficult thing to do; the one-word lines are mainly verbal, as can be seen above with "salt" and "drown", the other, earlier, is still more menacing:

the sea
sips
our fields.

Here the verb is so gentle as to make the sea's action far more sinister. Tapner is good at delicate verbal effects like this, which do not make a pyrotechnic display but do their job insidiously and unnoticed. Look again at that quote from "Thames Idol":

Find me in your own time
find me in your own face

Do our mind and eye, coming to the end of that second line, not subconsciously expect the word "place", the usual match of "time", until he surprises us with its rhyme-word "face"? And having been surprised, we read the phrase more carefully; if a mirror were handy we might well be glancing into it, looking for some trace of our ancestors.

There are notes to the cycle, at the back where they don't impinge on reading. Indeed it is perfectly possible to understand the poems without ever looking at them, but it is the nature of a cycle like this, if well done, to make one want to know more of its background and I think many readers will derive pleasure from a closer knowledge of the people who have come alive for us in these poems.
Flatlands is available from Salt

Interview with Victor Tapner

Victor Tapner lives in Essex and is a freelance writer, having previously worked as a journalist on the Financial Times. He has published poems in many magazines and anthologies, and had success in several competitions – his poem Kalashnikov won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2000. His first collection, Flatlands, has just been published by Salt and you can read more about it here

In one of my other interviews, the poet Paul Yandle spoke of how an early poem of Victor's, "Cof...

Review of Da Happie Laand, Robert Alan Jamieson, Luath Press 2010

The first thing to say is that when I'd finished this book, I knew for certain I would read it again. This is important, because I've been fearfully disappointed in my novel-reading over the last few years; if I had a quid for every well-reviewed contemporary novel I've read once and know I shall never re-read… Usually it's because they just don't seem to be about anything fundamental enough, and they don't do enough to me; you don't get that wrung-out feeling of having been through somethin...

A poem in memory of a poet

Leslie Norris was a fine Welsh poet and short story writer who lived and taught for many years in America, at the Brigham Young University. He's one of those writers whose work is hard to find onlne, but the poem here, "Christmas Day", demonstrates among other things how important animals were to him. He died in 2006 and the university where he taught has now brought out a double number of their semi-annual publication Literature and Belief (vols 29 and 30.1., eds Daniel Westover and Jesse S ...