It has been a long time since I last posted anything substantial on my blog. In the great scheme of things pandemic, this will not have been remarked upon; though for anybody out there who has noticed, I send my apologies. A particular disappointment is that I have not been able to review this year’s shortlisted Forward First Collections (and the announcement of the winner is almost upon us). For what it’s worth, I think Caleb Femi will win with his Penguin collection, Poor. I still hope to review some of the shortlist, in the near future.
Though I have managed a couple of book reviews (on Pia Tafdrup’s new Bloodaxe collection, on Charlie Louth’s excellent book about Rilke) to be published elsewhere, alongside this blogging drought there has been a more significant one (for me at least): I have hardly managed to write any poetry of my own for well over nine months now. Even the few things I managed to draft (especially at the height of the Covid second wave (last January)), I have signally failed to return to and they may all now fall by the wayside. In moments, it is as if I have forgotten HOW to write a poem; a questioning of the importance of this solitary business; a simple lack of external stimulation perhaps. The one thing I have been able to do during this awful period is more translation. I have (happily) been commissioned to complete exciting projects for two publishers (publication dates off into 2023 in both cases) and I hope to say more about these in later blogs. Yes, my intention is to get back to blogging more regularly.
It has also been a long time since I gave anything resembling a public reading. But last Sunday afternoon I travelled with poet, Hilary Davies, out of London to Kimbolton School, north of Bedford for an actual in person book launch! The book was the sumptuous new anthology, Hollow Palaces, published by Liverpool University press and edited by John Greening and Kevin Gardner from Baylor University in the USA. The book is the first complete anthology of modern country house poems, including over 160 poets from Yeats and Betjeman to Heaney, Boland, Armitage and Evaristo.
The venue was fittingly grand. Kimbolton Castle is a country house in the little town of Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire and it was the final home of King Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Originally a medieval castle, it was later converted into a stately palace and was the family seat of the Dukes of Manchester from 1615 until 1950. It now houses Kimbolton School and this is where John Greening taught for a number of years (alongside Stuart Henson, another poet represented in the anthology).
With the declining sun streaming in through the opened French windows, looking out across the school playing fields, after an introduction from Kevin Gardner, we each read a couple of poems from the anthology. So – amongst others – John Greening read ‘A Huntingdonshire Nocturne’ about the very room we were assembled in, a subtle take on English history and education, Ulster and Drogheda. Hilary Davies’s poem rooted in Old Gwernyfed Manor in Wales, was a fantasy of lust, sacrifice, murder and hauntings. Stuart Henson’s compressed novelistic piece mysteriously described the murder or suicide of a Fourteenth Earl. Anne Berkeley remembered childhood isolation and bullying at a dilapidated Revesby Abbey. Rory Waterman re-visited the ruins of an old, tied lodge-house his grandmother once lived in. Lisa Kelly’s chewy foregrounded language (‘O drear, o dreary dreary dirge for this deer’) shaped itself into a sonnet. Rebecca Watts looked slant and briefly at Ickworth House, a glimpse of bees in lavender. Robert Selby was at Chevening, considering the clash of perspectives between the tourist’s casual gaze and the realities of tombs, time and history.
I chose to read Louis MacNeice’s brilliant, late poem ‘Soap Suds’. Written in 1961, he is remembering the grand house called Seapark which overlooks Belfast Lough. Jon Stallworthy has called the poem a ‘Proustian daydream’, the simple act of washing one’s hands acting as the trigger for remembrance of time past. What appeals to me about the poems is its subtle handling of several times periods: the ageing man washing his hands, looking back to idyllic occasional visits to the house, as well as later, less happy times there (the house belonged to Thomas Macgregor Greer, only brother of MacNeice’s step-mother), the imagery beginning to verge on the nightmarish. (For another blog on MacNeice’s work click here.)
My own poem in the book, as yet unpublished elsewhere, is called ‘Our Weird Regiment’. The poems remembers a compilation of country house visits over the years. One was a visit to the French chateau at Villandry where the formal gardens, I remember, were not conventionally planted with flowers but with vegetables and herbs. I’m posting the text to MacNeice’s as well as my own poem, alongside the phone video (made by Jane Greening) of the 5/6 minute reading I gave at Kimbolton.
Soap Suds by Louis MacNeice
This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.
And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.
To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice, cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then
Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.
x
Our weird regiment by Martyn Crucefix
How the rich impress us
with what they own
displaying family photos
on the piano lid
as if no different
x
to those of us who shuffle
through elaborate rooms
or glance aside
through leaded glass
x
into formal gardens
where cabbage
potato and mint perhaps
chive and marjoram
x
are elegantly deployed
to be admired
not cooked or eaten
our guide explains
x
the farmlands purchased
to the churchyard wall
and then beyond it
every mound ploughed
x
and levelled in accord
with his lordship’s
goose-feathered whim
yet a scattering of bones
x
has assembled itself
in a heap at the gate
now beyond the gate
x
our weird regiment
lurches into the road
a swaying of skulls
and whitened knucklebones
Glad you are back, and thank you for both the McNeice and your own lovely poem.
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Happy to hear from you and to read this blog. Well, you have beaten me. I have written 2 poems since the pandemic began! And I do feel sad about it.
But I’ve been working hard on next novel – just finishing the copy edits. And glad you are deep in translations. To everything there is a season?
Your ability to translate is a special gift and allows you to share poets with us in a way that the Daodejing teacher would have approved. Perhaps we will each have a Rilke-like flood of new poems one day!
See? Two references I couldn’t have made without you!
Keep well.
Love,
Maggie x
Novel: ‘The Prisoner’s Wife’ by Maggie Brookes now available in UK, USA, Canada, NZ, S Africa, Australia, The Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Mexico, the Czech Republic and Poland. Fiction website: http://www.maggiebrookes.uk
6th poetry collection ‘everlove’ (The London Magazine) 2021. Poetry website: https://www.maggiebutt.co.uk
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Many thanks Maggie – it has been an uphill struggle (as for so many, in so many ways). Plus WordPress have made some appalling changes to their system while I have been away – seeming to make things harder by being more complicated. Called progress probably… But your support very much appreciated and I hope normal blogging service might resume. Looking forward to seeing your new novel too.
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I picked up a ‘review’ copy of Tom Rawling’s book ‘Ghosts at my back’ for £3.50 in the Oxfam bookshop in Oxford yesterday and am enjoying reading it 40 years after it was published. That got me remembering other poets from the Old Fire Station when I visited a few times. I found W. N. Herbert has a strong web presence, and you with this blog and very much enjoyed ‘Our weird regiment’. I can’t remember anybody else’s name. Thankyou. I will look out for books by both of you as well.
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Couldn’t find your actual name but thanks for the comment. Good days a very long time ago. Dear Tom. I think I blogged on his work here somewhere. Warmest wishes.
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Hi Martin, My name is Alastair Fear. I use Backstreeter as pseudonym on my blog about Abingdon. I am hoping to make a small collection of poems about Abingdon one day and am slowly collecting contributions in one part of the Abingdon Blog https://abingdonblog.co.uk/?cat=377. Best Wishes Alastair
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