Impressions of the TS Eliot Prize Readings 2025

January 13, 2025January 13, 2025 martyn crucefix blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, Gay poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry competitions, poetry in performance, political poetry, post-colonial writing, religious poetry, writing Anthony Joseph, Banshee Press, Bloodaxe Books, Carcanet Press, Carl pillips, Dialogue Books, Faber and Faber, Gboyaga Odubanjo, Gustav Pparker Hibbett, Hannah Copley, Hannah Sullivan, Helen Farish, Ian McMillan, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Katrina porteous, Mimi Khalvati, Pavilion Poetry, Penguin Poetry, Peter Gizzi, Picador Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, Rachel Mann, Raymond Antrobus, TS Eliot Prize

I’ve always enjoyed Ladybird spotting the ways poets present themselves in a reading situation. Last night’s TS Eliot prize readings at the Festival Hall was a grand opportunity for such a pursuit. Ten readers in a row. Here are a few jotted down impressions, gleaned from the on-line version of the show. Before you crucify me for such poor, ill-informed critical judgements, I do hereby declare I have only thoroughly read two of the contenders, so these are very much impressions of ‘what happened on the night’. I’ll leave mentioning my favourite and my predicted winner (not the same poet) to the end. The award will be announced this evening (Monday 13th January 2025).

The housekeeping…. This year, the shortlist was chosen by judges Mimi Khalvati (Chair), Hannah Sullivan and Anthony Joseph. The TS Eliot Prize (it says on their website) is among the world’s most celebrated awards. Inaugurated in 1993 to celebrate the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet, the prize is now awarded by the TS Eliot Foundation. The evening was introduced by Ian McMillan.

In the order the shortlist for this year’s prize was presented last night:

Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books) – KP was described as a northern lighthouse by Ian McMillan – finding the universal in the local – the north east of England – Holy Island – this is poetry full of its concrete ‘subject’ – details and actuality, a powerful wish to communicate (the book is full of explanatory Notes) – here, the coal beginning (to be formed) again – Our Billie – a local girl, forms the backbone of one poem – some unfortunate ‘down with the kids’ moments, referencing Insta and emojis – KP reads in a bobbing, fidgeting sort of way – does stillness evoke more power? – ‘The children STARE at their phones’ – particular words picked out for heavy emphasis – a bit over insistent on their significance – a robot explores the moon surface now – an interest in new technology – but then, the Antarctic without ice – the book title, rhizodont, is a fish transitioning onto land a very long time ago – the delivery here surely too mimetic – snarly, is that how a fish sounds? But passionately held views without a doubt.

Rachel Mann Eleanor Among the Saints (Carcanet Press) – McMillan suggested that Mann takes up liturgical language and re-invents it (for a modern audience?) – Eleanor the central figure is a trans woman of the 14^th century – at one point she’s in conversation with Julian of Norwich and Margery Kemp, so lots of hazelnut references – but thank goodness I didn’t hear ‘all shall be well’ – the delivery a slow emphatic one, I actually wrote ‘from the pulpit’ before I noticed (I think) the dog collar – am I right? – lots of first person voice going on here – often in an ecstatic (religious) mode, a few grand arm gestures – the language often moving towards Hopkins (why not?) – masculinity? –embroidering a priest, sanctus, sanctus, then love – the murdering of a trans girl, drawing a bead on contemporary relevance – in 1394 Eleanor was arrested – the dark shades worn by RM curiously out of keeping with the verse lines.

Carl Phillips Scattered Snows, to the North (Carcanet Press) – from the US –‘quiet’ being the word here – rather sweetly alluded to his sponsors for the evening – Lemsip – welcome to England – the lines being read in the cadence of a breath, a dying fall – suggestive here of an interior communion, very delicate, exploration of an emotional life – McMillan suggested this is where time and intimacy meet – what do they say to each other I wonder? – a taking off of clothes – then he also takes his clothes off – colours and a bell – a concern (as technique and subject matter) for precision, for what is true? (how unfashionable in the US) – snows in the title poem, Phillips manages to take us to Roman history and love without us getting lost along the way – quietly persuasive and good company – a forest journey – things almost said – a vulnerability to this writer (someone else posted this idea) I’ll borrow it.

Gustav Parker Hibbett High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press) – opening with allusions to Ovid for the Icarus link – reaching for the sunlight (not the best of phrases) – but athletics as a metaphor it seems at first – sliding into athletics for real – practising high jumps with a friend – in a world where they are regarded as ‘interchangeable’ because of ethnicity – the dark body hanging – the poems delivered head down, reading from the page, a whispering voice, not coming from the throat or diaphragm, so intimate as to be rather too in-turned – these are plain narratives, lots of ‘stuff’ – one later poem is longer, more sustained and the insistence on these real details begins to transform the poem into something a bit more visionary – jumping 6’ 8” – Noah, all he wanted was the stars – black boys doing anything – the USA and Mexico – to customise paradigms if they don’t fit.

Karen McCarthy Woolf Top Doll (Dialogue Books) – this turns out to be a verse novel so rather hard to convey a clear impression of it – Hugette a female recluse who lived with lots of dolls – KMW read several dramatic monologues this evening – Maman being spoken by a French doll – a rag doll speaking as if a military general, denying that he is a ‘gollywog’ – big pause on that – these are probably funny in many ways – but with their points to be made – but Woolf is acting them out with neck, eyes and eyebrows – male dolls, deep-voiced, female, light, a dancer doll flighty voiced – Ballerina Barbie is all en pointe and pirouette (arms being waved on stage) – yes, fictional and imaginative recreation, but this begins to feel like a sort of ventriloquism in the delivery – the mask is evident – being acted out – I can’t hear the verse of this verse novel – a Japanese doll to finish off with – cherry blossom, bento, the moon. My review of KMW’s earlier collection An Aviary of Small Birds.

Interval

Helen Farish The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books) – a book-long retrospective on an old ended relationship – trying to say what is perhaps inarticulate – joy and ache – biographical narrative as universal – McMillan suggests the relationship is merely a ‘hook’ rather than the ‘focus’ that it surely is? – the delivery is slow and fluting, very deliberate and clear almost as if Farish is finding the words (for the first time) as she goes – effective I think – again poetry with a lot of subject stuff – lists of local colour, places, events, food and drink – things we loved, a list – though spoken of as ‘a’ relationship this feels really quite narrowly autobiographical – driving the M40 discussing having (not having) children – a bit toe-curling, some allusions to film Pretty Woman with Gere and Roberts – who is it says ‘we were made for each other’ these days – a valentine card? – nice recipe at the end, pasta and red wine – but surely a candle was on the table too?

Peter Gizzi Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry) – also from the US – the delivery here a steady pulsing (these are short lines, I think, and Gizzi seems to be breathing and voicing that – a rich, resonant voice (the kind you’re born with) – a terrific flow and a shifting from concrete to abstract – the moon and then ‘kinda real, kinda not’ – the ingenious light – a letting out of inner weather – a rather self-conscious making of fine phrases and with the ‘self’ as the primary subject (not the outer) there are passages of pure lyricism – risks even allusions to the Muse, a lyre, but bedded in American colloquial – neatly done – forests, shapes, landscapes all becoming the inner life, representing it – shapes become the beloved – without reading more I’m none the wiser as to what is elegiac here or fierce – but interesting poems.

Hannah Copley Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry) – McMillan suggesting Copley’s book pushes language to the state of music – do we expect Mallarme? – not at all – the lapwing gives the chance for some birdsong – but lapwing does not speak but is rather spoken about – another bird, a daughter… Peet? – all the folksy names for a lapwing, of course – the bird is found to be missing – a mosaic, otherwise know as – the bird becoming person – a poem about addiction – our creaturely behaviours – the difficulty of caring for someone (some bird) – raggedy, slugs, let him disintegrate, love – Copley also reads in cadences that fall every time, not quite clear whether these are the lines of verse or her grammatical units – the lapwing figure is anthropomorphised or a human being is birdified – a nice balancing act mostly – though some less so – a family tree and (very human) grief – something to feather – ready to give – think I’d have liked more musicality.

Gboyega Odubanjo Adam (Faber & Faber) – Odubanjoof course not present after his tragic, untimely death – this his first and only collection – Adam the name given to the torso of a boy pulled from the Thames some years back – a couple of recordings of the author were played – poems read by Joe Carrick-Varty and Gabriel Akamo – the latter the much better reader – a memorial set of poems to the disappeared, the dispossessed – the dead boy’s imagined journey through Germany to the UK – thank you to the woman, the people, the police – this language is more like music – a montage-like, even Whitmanesque feel to the rolling cadences, a riffing and use of repetition, the material rising towards the mythic – blow trumpet as if apocalyptic – chorus, musical bridge transition, outro – a burned CD, its track-listing – a weird fairy tale about water – frog and scorpion, two sisters, ocean and sun in a dialogue – gosh – yes this is good work.

Raymond Antrobus: Signs, Music (Picador Poetry) – this was introduced as a book about fatherhood and masculinity – wasn’t that the 1990s? – a subject for all time – the pleasures (and anxiety) about bathing with your own child – coded with scripture – the son doesn’t pee, but it would have been OK if he did – this is poetry with a lot of ‘I’ – but surreal little flights and often incantatory, an enjoyable allowance of the musical nature of language – I broke up with, I broke up with – anaphora-driven here – the buying of a second hand noise – but I said nothing is where it ends – the intrigue of what remains silent – poems are being performed but not acted out – though there’s a bit of surf-board business, arms keeping balance, as the poem is read – teaching his son BSL – for music – another swaying, conducting sort of motion – yes – very engaging – ‘poetry is music from the place we were born’ (though that’s a very constricting definition). I reviewed two of RA’s earlier collections – The Perseverance and All the Names Given.

On the night, my favourite was Carl Phillips (despite his sore throat). But Gboyega Odubanjo’s work was also powerful in ways that I cannot articulate and for that reason – but also for reasons external to the poetry – I think he will be posthumously awarded the TS Eliot Prize 2025.

Late Addendum (11pm Monday 13th January) – and the winner was Peter Gizzi Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry)

‘Midsummer at High Laver’: a return to an old poem of mine

January 10, 2025 martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, Romantic poetry, writing All Saints' Church, art, Beneath Tremendous Rain, coming of age poem, compositional process, emotion, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Essex, graveyard poems, heart v head, Henry Cecil Wyld, High Laver, how I wrote the poem, John Locke, literary tourism, parents in poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, rationality, Silbury Hill, travel, writing

We were out in Essex recently. My daughter is planning to get married and she wanted to look at wedding venues! I know. Things you do. I’ll give nothing away but just to say the trip was a success – the happy day will be in 18 months time. But while checking google maps as to how to get to the venue, I noticed that we were going to be driving near the village of High Laver. All sorts of bells clanged as a friend of mine used to rent a house up near there and we visited him many years ago. The house was a classic English cottage, must have been 16/17^th century; nothing in it was straight, wood paneling everywhere, and he told stories of ghostly presences, things moving about in the night. I remember him opening an old wooden chest – something out of Wolf Hall, I now think – and inside was a fine old vinyl record player. Nice mix of old and new. The landscape was Essex-flat in the main, large fields. It must have been summertime – water irrigators were spraying the fields, and the fields seemed to be full of potato plants coming into flower.

There was a party in the evening – of which I remember nothing – but at some point, we drove to High Laver itself, to All Saints’ Church. I imagine this was just a local ‘sight’, though it may well have been that I initiated the trip as I knew who was buried in the churchyard. Wikipedia tells me: High Laver is a village and civil parish in the Epping Forest district of the county of Essex, England. The parish is noted for its association with the philosopher John Locke. Yes – I may well have been fan-hunting an old philosopher’s grave. But this was not long after I’d completed my doctorate on the philosophy and poetry of PB Shelley and Locke’s influence on PBS formed a major chapter. Wiki again: one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the ‘father of liberalism’, Locke was one of the first of the British empiricists in the tradition of Francis Bacon. His ideas include social contract theory and significant contributions to epistemology and political philosophy.

The poem – a sequence of 5 short lyrics – that came from this visit was eventually published in my first book, Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990). I don’t remember the truth of the chronology, but the poem suggests I’d been to my parents’ home in Wiltshire, perhaps immediately before. Remember, I was coming out of years of Higher Education, probably wondering what (if anything) I was now fit for, ceasing (at last) being a child, becoming an adult, looking back and forwards into my own and my parents’ futures. So the ‘journey’ motif with which the poem opens is both literally geographical and autobiographical – the long summer roads of childhood…

I’ve beaten roads dusty with summer to be here.

Left the two of them, hands held, then waving

before the groomed hedge. Both looked older

again, walking Wiltshire fields, where slopes

have browned and stained poppy-red in places

like a bloody graze across sun-burned knees:

a hurt from those days quickly soothed by Mum;

bragged up later to a great exploit for Dad.

The two of them . . .

I remember I was pleased with the image of the Wiltshire fields (to be contrasted a bit later with the fields of Essex) and I know I was thinking/seeing in my mind a particular field beside the A4 from Silbury Hill to Marlborough on my regular route from Wiltshire to London: the dry field browning, the red poppies drifted through it: a graze on a sunburned knee. The drive to Essex goes on in the poem….

Absentminded,

my body alone has felt the pedals, held the wheel

as I’ve unearthed older and younger days

as precisely as those thumb-nail steps carved

in the solid encyclopedia I homeworked from,

perched at a desk on the edge of my bed.

The process of psychological recovery – the unearthing – of past youth: hence both ‘older and younger days’. As a schoolkid, I’d take homework upstairs, exactly as described here, unfold a little card table (green baize), sit on my bed, and work. The dictionary, I still have it. The Universal English Dictionary, edited by Henry Cecil Wyld, in the Thirteenth Impression of 1960. It smells musty, but still somehow of home. Is there a technical name for the thumb-nail steps for each letter of the alphabet? It is the precision of these steps and the idea of dictionary definitions that enter the poem here in the shape of my childhood and teenage faith in reason and empirical accuracy as a way forward (till I was 19 I thought I was going to be a scientist). The second part of the poem runs:

I bolted knowledge then.

The cuckoo, beak biggest part of itself.

A schoolboy stealing coinage from lucid books,

laying instalments on a life of smart logic.

The irony being applied to my younger self, my self-(over-)confidence, is a bit obvious I guess in the choice of ‘bolted’, the cuckoo image, the thieving image, ‘lucid’ and ‘smart’ as easy adjectives, and the hire purchase image of ‘instalments’. The contrast is made immediately in the poem via natural images of earth and stars (the potato flowers):

Now I drive through the fecundity of earth,

through these hectares of flowering potato,

white constellations adrift on undulating green,

with the conviction that this is a watershed:

so much of the talk at home is of death;

how do I brazen that out with an argument?

My old subject: time. Against which there can be no argument. What does the reasonable man say to time and death?

The third part of the poem re-states this same idea through a rather caricatured version of John Locke (the ‘stodgy book’ is his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) which I’d waded through for my thesis). Time and death are restated also via images of the graveyard at High Laver, trying to make sense of my inclination to visit graveyards, finally accepting that the impetus for this is of the ‘heart’ not of the head.

I’ve come to where jet-sprays of irrigation

relieve the cracked fields of hot midsummer.

I’ve come in self-conscious homage to High Laver,

burial place of that logical father,

whose stodgy book of rational commonsense,

sprung the tradition I’ve clung to long enough.

A laburnum sapling creaks in its rubber thong

at a stake, where I stalk the graveyard to find

the oldest stone . . . Always I’ve done this,

yet surreptitiously, plotting false explanations

for myself as it’s the heart that says this

is a powerful place, where generations

of local good and ill in swathes

have gone down like centuries of grass.

In the fourth part of the poem, I am caught off-guard on what began as a ‘reasoned’ piece of literary tourism by an access of powerful emotion in relation to the lives and (feared) deaths of my own parents: ‘there’s more than I feared / of the two of them’.

But I forget what I’m here for.

Stood beside this body volume of displaced earth,

piled weeks ago beneath the trees –

on that last day some stranger’s beloved mother

had more flowers than she ever dreamed of.

The blown wreathes outstare me.

In a blink aside there’s more than I feared

of the two of them, wrapped against coming cold:

Dad, hands stuffed in his pockets,

standing off on his own; Mum, struggling

to peg out snapping shirtfuls of wind.

The sequence ends with more ‘straight’ description of the rural landscape of Essex. I remember labouring hard over the image of the water irrigation system which directs its spray (often 40 feet into the air) in one direction and then (through some mechanism I don’t know about) it flips and begins spraying in a quite different direction. I knew this was the ‘objective correlative’ of what felt like a significant shifting of my own outlook; simply, a recognition of the importance of the ‘heart’, though ‘judder’ ‘slam’ and ‘sudden’ suggest a near traumatic shift at that. Nor did I want the ending of the poem to be too gloomy, and those white-flowering potato plants return in the final phrase to suggest the psychic shift I’m trying to explore will have a fertility of its own (even if yet unseen) personally and artistically.

I watch the flailing mare’s-tail, the jet-stream

spray of the irrigator beside the church.

Its white angle above the potato fields

seems to crumple to a vaporous nothing, yet

a judder slams sudden clouds of fizzing spray.

It’s drenching some different sector of the field,

this drained, tearful, flowering place.

‘Muzzle’ – a new poem for the New Year

January 1, 2025February 25, 2025 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, New British Poetry, poetry, political poetry, UK poetry magazines, writing books, Daodejing, ecopoetics, ecopoetry, Enitharmon Press, General Election 2024, Glyn F Edwards, hunting with guns, literature, Modron Magazine, poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Salt Publishing, Sonnets to Orpheus, Sussez Downs, use of refrain in poem, writing, Zoe Brigley

Happy New Year to all of you. We are hoping for the best aren’t we? Come rain, shine or named storm, the poems go on, saying something at least for the individual, the social, for careful consideration of the world out there, the world in here, and the languages we use. I’m posting a poem which has just appeared on New Year’s Day at the excellent Modron Magazine, its strap line is ‘Writing on Nature and the Ecological Crisis’. Glyn F Edwards also interviewed me about the making of the poem and I’ll post the text of that below, along with the link to Modron. Do go and take a good look at what other work they have put up in this new Issue 5. And then subscribe to them. My poem is weirdly formatted – so here is an image of it, lacking its title which is: ‘Muzzle’

On the Writing of ‘Muzzle’

MC: It’s so interesting to be encouraged to look back at the process of writing a poem. I seldom do it (I suspect I’m not alone), forever rushing on to the next ‘best’ thing (we think, we hope). In looking back at ‘Muzzle’ (I find I have the very first draft and several subsequent ones) two things strike me: that it took so long to get to a ‘finish’, and that I’d forgotten how important the context of the poem was to what it might be expressing.

The first draft was scribbled in a notebook in the autumn of 2016. Earlier in the same notebook, I was sketching out thoughts on my, then, just-published version of the classic Chinese poems, the Daodejing (Enitharmon, 2016), preparing for readings I was to give from the book. Elsewhere there are fragments about my parents’ growing difficulties at home and (later) in their care home, plus some quite late drafts of the longish poem about the plight of refugees in the Mediterranean which was published as Cargo of Limbs (Hercules, 2019), and even first drafts of the poems which have eventually come to make up my most recent collection, Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023). Remember, the Brexit referendum took place in June 2016 and if there is an idea that links all these differing creative endeavours (including ‘Muzzle’) it is the idea of ‘division’.

Q1 – Only with the word ‘dog’ at the end of the third stanza does the reader gain a semantic connection to the ‘Muzzle’ in the title of the poem. Of course, Chekhov’s gun was ‘cocked’ all along, and the ‘muzzle’ becomes the open end of a weapon where a bullet escapes. Can you explain a little more of the rationale for this subtle title?

MC: To my surprise, I find, the first draft has no ‘muzzle’ mentioned in it at all. But the shape and a lot of the substance of the finished poem is already there: the flag-waving men during an idyllic autumn walk (on the Sussex Downs, as far as I remember), the shooting party, even the man and his dog at the end of the poem. The muzzle of a ‘smoking gun’ is clearly implied but the final dog’s muzzle does not make an appearance till quite late (I mean 2020 or so!). In fact, in the first draft I clearly don’t know how to end the poem. There, the walking couple emerge from the wood ‘unscathed’, the dog in the field grows tense, and there’s a sense of the man’s day being ‘interrupted’ by the couple. But these final 5 lines are crossed through. In the later draft, the dog now ‘cantilevers up’ onto all fours (the mechanisation of the creature is part of the male group’s malign influence in my mind) – but still no muzzle as such. That only comes via a reference to the man’s gun and, with its proximity to the dog’s head and ears, there is a transference of the word/idea to the dog itself. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t till this point that I thought of calling the poem ‘Muzzle’ and that I also wanted the word to apply to the walking couple who have been (by the experience, by their apprehension, if not their genuine fear) muted or muzzled themselves. The idea was actually there early on; the first draft briefly sketched in, ‘no human voice we do not talk’.

Q2 – The refrain ‘not at us’ is repeated, and echoes again in ‘not for us’ – amongst the ‘white flags’, and the reassurances of safety, there appears a growing threat to the speaker. The reader is left with the feeling that somehow this danger extends beyond the shooting party, and beyond bloodsports. Did you seek for the poem to act as a wider allegorical foreboding, and, if so, would you elaborate on the metaphor?

MC: Yes, the ‘not at us’ phrase or versions of it are already in the first draft, indeed on four occasions. This is one of the main sources of the idea of ‘division’ in the poem. It’s a simple ‘us’ and ‘them’ situation. The white flags – I think these would simply be the shooting-party’s beaters’ flags being waved to move the birds across the field into the woods, or possibly they are genuinely ‘monitory’ (meaning simply to warn or admonish), but in being white they also have (ironic) resonances of surrender (these guys were not going to surrender anything). The repeating phrase emphasises the gulf between the two elements of the encounter and particularly the sense (clear on the actual occasion) that those holding guns did not seem much concerned that unsuspecting, endangered walkers might be near at hand. We felt ignored; they seemed not to look at us. Being England, there is a strong class element here, which does not map easily onto the question of the voting intentions by class in the Brexit referendum, but factions on all sides seemed not to be paying much attention to any other. The devastating Tory defeat of 2024 should be regarded as reflecting much of this: eventually the country at large felt those in government were simply not paying any attention ‘to us’. I’ve always been pleased with the adjective ‘established’ to describe the shooting-party’s positioning, their being arrayed as the ‘establishment’. The finished poem ends ambivalently. The walking couple escape the shooting-party but are faced with another threatening situation: the gun, the dog. The ‘guard-like’ posture now puts me in mind of prison camp patrols the world over and I’d be happy for readers to get there too: there is a policing of freedoms going on here, a sliding scale from rural pastimes, to political enforcement, to genocidal pograms.

Q3 – ‘Muzzle’ zigzags, indents, retraces its steps. Some stanzas loop longer, and when the final sestet ends abruptly, without full stop, the reader becomes aware of the absence of punctuation throughout. You have a very idiosyncratic approach to presenting and punctuating the poem – could you share your intentions in this poem, and elaborate on whether these ally or counter your conventional style?

MC: The final form of the poem – which you describe so well – came very late. Most often my poems ‘find’ their own form – they don’t begin with any sense of the shape they will eventually take. The 2020 draft was coming out in tercets and I remember liking the ‘walking pace’, step by step, which that shape suggested. But in the end I wanted the poem to be more radical, to suggest a sense of freedom (in contrast to what is felt by the couple during the incident), a freedom to roam as it were, for lines to wander across the page and back again, while also acknowledging that this meandering might well yield some uneasiness in the reader (where’s he going?!). Both freedom and anxiety would be appropriate here. The form and the absence of punctuation (the latter I have been working with for several years now) are intended to generate some ambiguity. For example, I’m hoping for a fluidity in the opening lines, with the putative subject or focus being the flag-waving men, eliding to the walking couple – the ‘you’, then the ‘I’ – the birds, the leaves turning, finally to the ‘grizzle-headed men’. Within this fluency, a bit later, I want several adjectives to be hovering between subjects. The word ‘unconsidered’ floats between the lack of consideration given to the couple and the waiting circle of parked cars. Similarly, ‘impatient unscathed’ buzzes between the couple (again) and the waiting man and dog. This culminates in the rattling throat in the final line which (I want) to be as much about the man as the dog itself and so the ‘discipline’ demanded of the situation ought to be seen as human as much as canine. I guess I’m trying for fertile ambiguities, trying to suggest two things at once. The opening of the Daodejing says: ‘the path I can put a name to / cannot take me the whole way’ (my version).

Q4 – The shooting party negatively influences their surroundings, their presence ‘Hanging’ and ‘spoiling’ the woods, and the walk of the speaker. How much familiarity do you have with these ‘grizzle-headed men’, and do any occasions, such as the one in ‘Muzzle’ stand out as memorable, or significant?

MC: As you suggest, I have allowed the shooting-party to be, and remain, those wearing the black hats. More often than not I feel the need, the wish, to revisit such emphatic designations: what’s to be said ‘on the other hand’ (ever the wishy-washy liberal). The jaw-dropping presumption of the shooters in the original incident (the poem says pretty much exactly what happened), coupled with the generally felt anger and dividedness of the UK at the time (and since) goes to explain why I have not done so here. Do I know people like this? I guess not. A remote acquaintance likes to share his stories of attending such exciting shooting-parties, but it’s hard even to find the language to create much common ground. Perhaps I am just too urban, metropolitan even. About hunting wild animals, Rilke says, ‘to kill is one form of our restless grief’ (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 11; my translation). Nothing I witnessed on that day in 2016 served to convince me otherwise; the taking out of another living thing for no useful purpose seems to require an arrogant presumption that I cannot get my head around and I find rather terrifying; the ‘monitory’ urgency in the final poem is as much concerned with how this sort of attitude plays out in the political, even in the military, sphere as it is with ‘blood sports’ more narrowly defined.

December 2024

Here’s the direct link to Modron – https://modronmagazine.com/a-poem-and-interview-with-martin-crucefix/

George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry

December 17, 2024 martyn crucefix brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, political poetry, post-colonial writing, writing An Essay on Autobiography, Bloodaxe Books, books, Boris Pasternak, Budapest, christianity, crown of sonnets, Holocaust, Hungary, John Sears, King's Gold medal for Poetry, Leeds College of Art and Design, Martin Bell, Martin Booth, objective correlative, Peter Porter, poetry, punctum, Roland Barthes, Soviet Invasion of Hungary, terza rima, The Photographer in Winter

This week’s announcement of the award of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry to George Szirtes gives me the opportunity to re-post a long and detailed review I wrote (for Poetry London) of the two books that Bloodaxe Books published to celebrate Szirtes’ 60th birthday. These were the New and Collected Poems and a critical book about his work, Reading George Szirtes, written by John Sears. Though Szirtes has continued to publish a good deal since the late 2000s, this review still seems to me to have something useful to say about the development and poetical achievement of this outstanding writer and might be of interest to those not yet familiar with his work. (For WordPress readers, I am experimenting with posting also on Substack. Do subscribe here if you’d like to read in that format: https://open.substack.com/pub/mcrucefix/)

This 500-page New and Collected Poems demonstrates the breadth and depth of George Szirtes’ achievements and will bring his work to even wider notice, casting the poet as a recording angel. His lines of literary influence run from Eliot’s phrase-making and metaphysics, through Auden’s formalism and politics, to earlier contemporaries like Peter Porter and Martin Bell (at the Leeds College of Art and Design). There are distinct phases to Szirtes’ oeuvre, but his work tends to a density of fragmented detail, bound by a allegiance to visible form, shot through with explicit theorising about perception, language, time, memory, self, the art itself. This is a heady and immensely ambitious mix – not one likely to appeal to popular tastes, but there is no-one more dedicated to poetry, to playing the long game, to bringing a uniquely European perspective to the theme of our age, the search for personal identity.

Szirtes’ career illustrates what Pasternak discusses in An Essay in Autobiography (Harvill, 1990). Though our experience of the world is necessarily subjective, there is a sufficient underlying matrix that remains “the common property of man” – the hard-wiring implicit in being human. Superimposed on this is the softer wiring derived from upbringing, environment and education, and the self is ultimately a function of these base matrices in progressive interaction with individual decision-making in the flow of experience. So the objective world is processed through the individual’s particular matrices – his/her sets of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, texturised as it were, accordingly. From this, Pasternak argues that when an individual dies he leaves behind his own unique “share of this . . . the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul”. This, of course, is where “art finds its . . . field of action and its main content . . . the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience”. Art can be defined as the expression of experience playing across the matrices of the self, saying not this is me, but this is, this was, mine.

It is the raw imagery of stasis and movement that emerges in Szirtes’ early work as being truly his and it blooms into the maturity of the late 1980s. In short lyrical pieces the point of stasis is associated with the preservative of art in the spit ball gobbed by a foreign worker in ‘Anthropomorphosis’ which is caught and “suspended” by the poem. The afternoon rearranges itself around it and even the narrator “hung there / Encapsulated in that quick pearled light”. Versions of this encapsulation abound: girls creating a silver foil tree find themselves absorbed into a Keatsian “cold pastoral”. Such freeze-frame moments anticipate Szirtes’ sustained meditations on photography but early on, images of snow and frost suggest the ambivalent status of such suspension. In ‘The Car’ a snowfall is both beautiful and sepulchral: “Fantastic Gaudi-like structures hung / Under the mudguard . . . . / Wonderful, cried the girls under the snow”. A girl who is observed sewing causes consternation (“I do not like you to be quite so still”) caught in a stasis that can “eat away a life” that can “freeze the creases of a finished garment” (‘A Girl Sewing‘).

In contrast, it is movement in the shape of the passage of time that spurs many other early poems and the artist’s power is limited to “measure breath in a small space” (‘Group Portrait with Pets’). The enigmatic title poem of the first collection seems to teeter elegantly along the knife-edge of the sense of threat to domesticity and the desire to secure in a “cage” and convert to “metaphors” (‘The Slant Door’). It seems for time there is “no use, no cure” (‘Silver Age’) and Szirtes senses this especially in the domestic sphere. ‘House in Sunlight’ casts the busy sun as the agent of transience threatening the house itself and the life within it:

Whoever lives here knows what they are about –

Forms appear suddenly in mirrors and photographs,

We do not think however that they are entirely at home.

At night the doors are locked. We lock them now.

John Sears’ book is a comprehensive academic review of Szirtes’ career, tracing the development of both key themes and formal experimentation. He suggests Martin Booth’s 1985 critique of Szirtes’ early work as “withdrawn and laidback” was influential on the poet. Booth suggested that Szirtes might try writing about “his childhood” (Sears, p. 61). If true, we have reason to be thankful to Booth, but there are signs that Szirtes was moving in this direction already. He travelled to Hungary in 1984 and was casting his gaze beyond these shores towards people who “lie in complete unity / In graves as large as Europe and as lonely” (‘Assassins’). The title poem of Short Wave (1984) deploys its central image to suggest the deciphering of voices that are obscure yet seem suggestive of “all Europe in her song”. The self-deprecating picture of Szirtes “listening / and turning dials, eavesdropping” is something to be treasured given the explosive impact these deciphered voices will eventually have on his work.

Several members of Szirtes’ family were caught up in the Holocaust and later in the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, escaping to the UK. Much of this was known to Szirtes only sketchily and he set himself the task of recovering what seemed lost. It is because Szirtes’ underlying matrices as an individual – stasis and movement, preservation and loss – mapped so powerfully onto his family’s own history and this history encompassed important European historical events that his work becomes in the late Eighties so much more complex, ambitious and important. History had determined his nature as a poet; his nature as a poet primed him to be able to encompass the burden of his own history.

So the title poem of The Photographer in Winter (1986) attempts the imaginative recovery of Szirtes’ mother from the Budapest of the 1940s and 50s. She was herself a photographer and her son traces her movements with “thoroughness and objectivity” as far as he can. Both as an artist and poet, Szirtes declares he has been “trained / To notice things” (the deliberate echo of Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’ is but one example of Szirtes’ very frequent intertextual allusions). But the recovery process seems often subject to disintegration, “trying to focus through this swirl / And cascade of snow”. At times the tone is more optimistic, like the final section of ‘The Swimmers’ in which a drowning girl survives the “icy Danube”. Elsewhere, intervening time destroys so much, and the later sequence ‘Metro’ (1988) uses the image of the Budapest underground system for “everything that is past, the hidden half”. His choice here of the deliberately curtailed thirteen-line sonnet is a characteristic recognition in formal terms that the search must remain incomplete.

The balance between one man’s search for his background and the conversion of this to poetry is a difficult one and if the marvelous sequence ‘The Courtyards’ is counted as one of the great successes, for me ‘Metro’ itself tips too far away from the memorial towards the monumental. There are occasions when Szirtes’ desire to recover and pay respects to his own history impels him to erect such elaborately formal accumulations of images that the reader may feel excluded, even if always impressed. The later ‘Transylvana’ is another occasion when the act of imaginative recovery can seem propelled for its own sake and despite the glittering formal achievement – terza rima in this case – the piling of detail on detail can become wearisome.

But Szirtes’ openness to theoretical thinking has always propelled his work forward and often derives more from his training in the visual rather than the literary arts. Blind Field (1994) draws on Barthes’ idea that in photography all that is not portrayed in an image may be implied by the presence of a “punctum” or detail within it. As Sears suggests (this is the sort of idea he is very good at elucidating) this bears some relation to Eliot’s objective correlative but is seen by Szirtes as a solution to the paradox that art stills the life it presents: “Out of this single moment a window opens” (‘Window’). This sense of the ballooning fluidity of experience, past and present, is one thing that marks his work as Modern and Post-Modern and it’s no surprise to see Szirtes countering Larkin’s belief that the passage of years makes us “smaller and clearer” arguing we grow “blurrier, vaster, ever more unfocused” (‘On a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’). It’s this slipperiness of personal identity that is Szirtes’ true theme and the one that elevates his work above the merely personal into a body of work addressing urgent contemporary concerns. As the poem ‘Soil’ puts it “there is nowhere to go / but home, which is nowhere to be found . . . / the very ground / on which you stand but cannot visit / or know”.

Everywhere these days, the recovery/re-construction of our own identities seems to be a pressing issue and the three sonnet sequences in Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape (1998) triumphantly present and simultaneously enact this process. Sears describes Szirtes’ form here as a “deliberately baroque form of the Hungarian sonnet sequence” or sonnets redouble (Sears, p. 145) in which the final line of each sonnet is repeated (approximately) as the opening line of the next and the final (fifteenth) sonnet is composed of approximations of each preceding sonnet’s closing line. Yet this is not an arid exercise in form as the recurrences and accumulations enact precisely what Szirtes believes is the process of the construction of the self – largely via language into a “lexical demesne” – in this case said to be “part Hungary, part England” (‘The Looking-Glass Dictionary’).

Retaining his love of the titled sequences, sections and subsections which had helped him draw a bead on his family’s obscured past – a tendency which produces the most typographically diverse and complex contents pages I’ve ever seen – from the late 1990s Szirtes’ work turns a firmly European gaze on the UK. An English Apocalypse ranges through Great Yarmouth, Keighley, Orgreave, Preston North End. all-in-wrestling and antisemitic violence towards images of “a tense / empire that could fall” (‘All In’), towards something “crumbling – a people possibly” (‘Dog-Latin’) and specific individuals “speaking the innate vernacular // of the trapped. He’s shit. Scum” (‘Offence’). Despite the success of Reel (2004), the new poems in this 2001 compilation, portraying an outmoded and disconnected England, are one of the high points of Szirtes’ career so far and they culminate in the extraordinary sequence of imagined apocalypses by meteor, power cut, deluge and suicide that caught the flip side of millennial euphoria and seem now years ahead of their time.

Apart from the sceptical cinematic pun Reel/real, the title of Szirtes’ 2004 T.S. Eliot prize-winning collection is an allusion to the predominance of the rolling, unravelling impact of his majestic terza rima. By this stage, there is a greater ease to the looping to and fro, the past and present, which Szirtes encompasses in this form.

Here I find bits of my heart. In these

Dark corridors and courtyards something true

Survives in such obsessive images

As understand the curtains of the soul

Drawing together in the frozen breeze.

(‘Reel’)

‘Sheringham’ also reinforces Szirtes’ familiar cumulative techniques remarking on the “boiled down particulars that regularly come / knocking at the skull”. Sonnets too continue to be a favoured form, though in the beautiful meditation on the aging processes, ‘Turquoise’, the neatly closing couplet of the “Shakespearian ending” is both employed and simultaneously questioned.

Indeed, echoes of the Bard’s obsessive negotiations with “swift-footed Time” (XIX) re-emerge as one of the most striking features of Szirtes’ more recent poems. A pizza can be enjoyed – but not to the exclusion of the river nearby, an unavoidable “emblem of time” (‘In the Pizza Parlour’). Szirtes is re-visiting the concerns of younger days from more slant-lit uplands. Now images of dust recur, here in the woman’s “dust-laden hair” while elsewhere birds are “swimming through dust” (‘Winter Wings’) and – in one of Szirtes’ most beautiful sonnets – a woman regards herself in the mirror, contemplating the impact of the passing years and gazing at her face “drowned in a cloud of dust: / How beautiful, she thought, and how unjust” (‘The Breasts’).

Translating Georg Heym’s ‘Berlin II’

December 10, 2024 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, German poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation, writing Antony Hasler, Babette Deutsch, Berlin II, Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Middleton, close analysis of poetry, Der ewig Tag, Expressionism, Faber and Faber, Georg Heym, Germann Expressionism, Havel River, Holderlin, Libris, Michael Hofmann, Petrarchan sonnet, translating German into English, TS Eliot

Michael Hofmann’s Faber Book of Twentieth Century German Poems includes four pieces by Georg Heym – not bad for someone who died at the age of 24 (in 1912 – an accidental drowning in the frozen Havel River, probably while trying to save a friend). Heym is generally regarded as an early Expressionist writer (of poems and short prose/novellas), though his early poems are very much under the influence of Hölderlin, then much of the surviving work suggests the powerful influence of Baudelaire (in both form and content), though in his final months there seems to have been a return to the looser forms of Hölderlin. His best-known poems combine a gothic, morbid imagination, often with extremes of Expressionistic distortion, with a counterbalancing devotion to regular forms. The sonnet ‘Berlin II’, when it appeared in Der Demokrat, in November 1910, led to the publication of Heym’s only collection published during his lifetime: Der ewig Tag (The Eternal Day).

Antony Hasler’s translations, published by Libris in 2004 (Hofmann also includes translations by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, and Christopher Middleton), are the best to be had at the moment and I’d definitely recommend searching them out (Libris has since folded). I’ve been in a bit of a translation lull for a few months so thought I’d try a few of Heym’s poems myself. The challenge is to make something readable in English, while not toning down the dark brutality, yet also staying close to his classical chosen forms.

In ‘Berlin II’, Heym’s Petrarchan rhyme scheme is ABBA CDDC EFE GHG. The opening quatrain is fairly straightforward. A literal transcription might be: ‘Betarred barrels rolled from the thresholds / of dark warehouses onto the high barges/boats). / The tugboats moved in. The smoke’s mane / hung sooty above the oily waters’.

Hasler has:

From the dim warehouse thresholds barrels caulked

with tar went rolling down to the tall lighters.

The tugboats started. On the oily waters

a mane of soot was trailing from the smoke.

The ‘lighters’ / ‘waters’ rhyme is a stroke of genius (a lighter is a river boat) but the opening line and the fourth seemed to me less successful. I kept the opening line simple and turned ‘waters’ into a possessive and I rather saw the (lion’s) mane more visually linked to the billowing of the smoke which is ‘soot-filled’ (I also tried ‘sooty’, even ‘smutty’). This is what I ended up with:

The tarred barrels rolled from open doorways

of dark warehouses onto the tall lighters.

The tugboats closed in. Across the waters’

oily surface hung the smoke’s soot-filled mane.

I went for the tugboats ‘closing in’ – not merely approaching, but something more threatening – as it seemed in keeping with the ominous atmosphere which develops as the poem goes on (the drumming in line 11).

The second quatrain might be given as: ‘Two steamers came with musical bands. / Their funnels cut/clipped the arch of the bridge. / Smoke, soot, stink lay on the dirty waves / of the tanneries with their brown skins’.

Hasler has:

Two pleasure-steamers came with music playing.

They dipped their funnels at the bridge’s curve.

Smoke, soot, stench lay on the dirty waves

by tanneries where the brown hides were drying.

I couldn’t quite see the funnels being dipped under the bridges (though I believe some boats do this) and I feel the bridge’s ‘curve’ (for roof or arch?) not quite right. So I went with the sense of the funnels actually scraping the roof of the bridges (as if these pleasure steamers did not really fit the generally grim, sordid scene). I was very happy to arrive at the bridge/stench half-rhyme for the middle couplet because the sounds there conveyed more of the Heymian ugliness of the scene. Like Hasler, I felt the need to explain a little what the pelts/skins/hides were doing hanging up at the tanneries. Here’s my second quatrain:

With music playing, two steamers passed by:

their funnels clipped the roof of the bridge.

On the filthy waves, smoke, smut, and stench

at the tanneries, where brown pelts hung to dry.

Lines 9-11 probably caused me the greatest difficulty, not so much in getting the word order and form right, but in simply grasping what was being said in relation to the bridges, the barge, and the narrator’s position. Literally they might read: ‘In/at/all the bridges, beneath us the barge / Carried through, the signals sounded / As if in drums, growing in the silence’.

As I see it, the speaker is being carried on a barge, through and under bridges, and there are signals/sirens sounding that bring to his mind an ominous drumming. So Hasler has:

Every time the barge that bore us travelled

beneath a bridge, the signal’s sudden parley

swelled out of stillness like a deep drum’s rattle.

The ‘barge that bore us’ has echoes of TS Eliot (perhaps not irrelevant in context, and I felt I couldn’t better it in the end) but I’m not sure Hasler makes sense (to me) of the signals and the ‘parley’ metaphor he introduces here is not there in the original. The ‘deep drum’ also seems to be picking up on the ‘ominousness’ of the scene but (for me) a bit heavy-handedly. In the end, I went for:

Through all the bridges, the barge that bore us

made its way, signals resounding as if

a drum’s beat grew louder in the stillness.

In the final 3 lines I made the biggest alteration, the biggest interference with the original poem. Literally, the lines might read: ‘We let go and drifted in the canal / Alongside the gardens slowly. In the idyll / We saw the giant chimneys’ night beacons’. Hasler loses the ‘letting go’ idea, but otherwise keeps the order of these lines well:

We entered the canal, and drifting journeyed

slowly alongside gardens. In the idyll

we saw the night-flares of the giant chimneys.

‘In the idyll’ is perhaps puzzling, though it’s pretty clear there is a bitter irony at work – this is no idyllic scene, and Heym’s other Berlin poems confirm this, the city is a monstrous megalopolis. But there has been a slight shift of scene with the boat moving along a canal now, between gardens. Perhaps this (more bourgeois?) setting might be thought of as more idyllic? But even so, the massive smoking and flaring chimneys of industrial Berlin can still be seen. I confess that I shifted the ‘idyll’ to the final lines to get the final rhyme with ‘canal’. But I have left it – translators, like poets, have the power of veto, whether we exercise it or not. And I have persuaded myself that the savagery of the irony comes out better if the final phrase of the poem contains it. So I went with:

We cut loose, went drifting along the canal,

gradually, between gardens, glimpses of

the vast chimneys’ night-flares in the idyll.

So – to sum up (though translations are always really a work in progress) – here is Heym’s original German followed by my own version of the poem:

Berlin II

Beteerte Fässer rollten von den Schwellen

Der dunklen Speicher auf die hohen Kähne.

Die Schlepper zogen an. Des Rauches Mähne

Hing rußig nieder auf die öligen Wellen.

Zwei Dampfer kamen mit Musikkapellen.

Den Schornstein kappten sie am Brückenbogen.

Rauch, Ruẞ, Gestank lag auf den schmutzigen Wogen

Der Gerbereien mit den braunen Fellen.

In allen Brücken, drunter uns die Zille

Hindurchgebracht, ertönten die Signale

Gleichwie in Trommeln wachsend in der Stille.

Wir ließen los und trieben im Kanale

An Gärten langsam hin. In dem Idylle

Sahn wir der Riesenschlote Nachtfanale.

Berlin II (tr. Martyn Crucefix)

The tarred barrels rolled from open doorways

of dark warehouses onto the tall lighters.

The tugboats closed in. Across the waters’

oily surface hung the smoke’s soot-filled mane.

With music playing, two steamers passed by:

their funnels clipped the roof of the bridge.

On the filthy waves, smoke, smut, and stench

at the tanneries, where brown pelts hung to dry.

Through all the bridges, the barge that bore us

made its way, signals resounding as if

a drum’s beat grew louder in the stillness.

We cut loose, went drifting along the canal,

gradually, between gardens, glimpses of

the vast chimneys’ night-flares in the idyll.

On Revisiting Blockley

November 26, 2024December 2, 2024 martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, teaching, translation, writing An English Nazareth, Blockley, Broadway Tower, burial rites, Cotswolds, Dewey decimal system, elegy, Enitharmon Press, Frederic Leighton, Hailes Abbey, In Memoriam, JRR Tolkein, Lares, Laurence Bowkett, marvel, Marvel comics, Mporeton-in-Marsh, poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke, The Lord of the Rings, The Smiths, travel, William Morris

A rather more personal post than usual, though a poem (an older one of my own) is attached to it. Last week, I spent a few days with family in the beautiful village of Blockley, in the Cotswolds. The weather was very good for late November and we walked a couple of times – from Broadway up the muddy hill to the folly of Broadway Tower (once frequented by William Morris apparently) and around Hailes Abbey (now a ruin, local lore has it that Thomas Cromwell watched the destruction of the Abbey from a nearby hilltop). Blockley itself is near Moreton-in-Marsh, a place almost destroyed by the volume of traffic flowing through it (even in November), where The Bell Inn was once a favourite of JRR Tolkein, and is supposedly the model for The Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings. But Blockley, for me at least, had another powerful ghost haunting it.

As a couple, with young children, we stayed in the village over 20 years ago, in one of the original silk weavers cottages built along Park Road, which looks down over the village and valley. The house was owned by a colleague of mine at the time, Laurence Bowkett. He taught Classics and Latin and often spent the summer vacations away on archaeological digs of various kinds. That must have been the situation then as he’d allowed us to use the house in his absence. His early death, within a year or two of this, was a shock to us all. He had no family of his own and I don’t know what happened to the house later. So, fast forward to 2024, and here we are staying in Blockley again, only partly by coincidence. We have always had good memories of the place and (again, partly by an AirB&B chance) we ended up renting an almost identical cottage in the very same terrace above the village. Indeed, maybe it was the same cottage – I couldn’t remember enough of the details. The layout was certainly the same – the front door in off the road, straight into a little front room, a chilly basement kitchen and upstairs two small bedrooms.

Laurence’s was not the first death of a contemporary I knew well, but it greatly affected me and I tried to express something of this in the poem – an elegy – I wrote for him later. It is called ‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ and it mixes memories of him, his enthusiasms (he had a lot of those – all his students loved him for it), with details from my own family life at the time. It opens with an imagined scene, all his teaching colleagues gathered (as we often did then) in the local pub, remembering him in his absence. The ‘laral gods’ – the Lares – are Classical Roman guardian deities. The laurus nobilis refers to a little bay tree I bought after our first stay in Blockley as a thank you gift . . .

By seven-thirty, you are with us all

tonight in the gloom of The Washington,

though we omit you from every round.

Powerless as laral gods who gave you

no protection, even laurus nobilis,

the bay tree I bought you, proved no use.

Our children were at Infant and Junior School at the time and – to be honest – I can’t now remember if the details the poem goes on to mention are truth or fiction. But Laurence was the kind of guy who’d keep his own books in scrupulous order (as he did with his extensive collection of Marvel comics) so the library setting has always felt right . . .

Today, I searched 570 and 790,

in the Dewey decimal classification

your fingers ran through a thousand times,

for the facts of death and irrepressible life,

as if I looked for you now and you then.

You taught shard-life and careful fieldwork,

the near-dead language of not giving in.

You offered the heroic a modern face,

though death proved the more determined.

You understood lives alter what they touch:

a house, a street, a flowering tree,

for those who know us are not struck dumb,

a library unread the moment we die.

They roar like a lantern with our life inside.

The idea of lives of the dead altering the lives of those they have touched in life is familiar enough, though I was working on my translations of Rainer Maria Rilke around this time and I’m sure his influence is in here. It is not just the remembering of a friend who has passed away, but also that our own perceptions of ‘a house, a street, a flowering tree’, for want of a better word, spiritualises the material object, giving it a life, a light, an existence, beyond the ordinary. The resurrection of the bugs stomped by my daughter in what follows is probably an allusion to the early primitive computer games the kids used to play in which a failed – hence fatal – leap from a high building would result only in a brief ‘death’ and their 1st person avatar would soon revive and carry on in pursuit of adventure.

In Hornsey Central at 570

this morning, I found books to undermine

my daughter’s smiling confidence

that bugs she crushes beneath her shoe

lie dead a while, then revive good as new.

At 790, I leafed through life and death

in Ancient Egypt for her older brother:

how they wash their dead in water and oil,

then bind them in linen smeared with gum

and priests wrap lucky charms inside

in hope that none will break the seal

till the dead themselves in time of need.

The ‘lucky charms’ idea naturally led the poem on to what I myself might place in a good friend’s sarcophagus and gave rise to a list of his multifarious likes and loves, concluding with the heartfelt wish that his (prematurely unhirsute) head might – even in death (though he had no religious belief as far as I know) – remain somehow protected. The image on the underside of Laurence’s umbrella is a truth!

Then I’ll wrap Homer for you, Wolves black-

and-gold, your Micra, Marvel, Blockley

and booze, moist, sweet cake for the road,

Frederick Leighton, Sir Frankie Howerd,

Wisden, The Smiths and that Italian umbrella

you flourished one day and thundered open –

behold! the Sistine roof appeared

to keep your bald head from the hissing rain.

‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ was originally published in An English Nazareth (Enitharmon Press, 2004).

Two Poems by the late Jürgen Becker

November 21, 2024 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, poetry competitions, political poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing And Other Stories, Berlin Wall, Claire Crowther, death of Jürgen Becker, Foxtrot in the erfurt Stadium, In Case of Loss, Jürgen Becker's poems translated into English, Jurgen Becker, Linda Black, Lutz Seiler, Shearsman Books, Stephen Spender Trust Translation prize, Suhrkamp Verlag, The Long Poem Magazine, Thuringia

The sad news that Jürgen Becker (1932-2024) died recently at the age of 92 was particularly poignant as I have been translating his work for the past 3 years. I first read about his poetry in an essay I was translating by Lutz Seiler (published in In Case of Loss (And Other Stories, 2024)). There, Seiler characterises Becker’s work as ‘a process that integrate[s] both immediate and more distant modalities of language, his own voice as well as materials drawn from other sources such as events, photos, maps as well as interjections from neighbouring rooms, from the mail, the news, weather conditions and whatever else stray[s] within range’ (my translation). History, politics, the importance of recording ‘small things’, an extraordinarly porous kind of poetry – these were the aspects that drew me to his work (as a writer of my own poems as much as translator).

Becker’s ‘typical’ poem works at length, resembling a stream-of-consciousness, but better thought of as a kind of collage or montage. His effects are slow-burning, allusive, even elusive, and I don’t think his work is likely to top any UK chart of popular poetry any time soon. But his revered status in Germany is remarkable and I have actually had a couple of successes recently with my translations: a Highly Commended in the 2024 Stephen Spender Trust Translation Competition, judged by Taher Adel and Jennifer Wong (with the poem ‘Meanwhile in the Ore Mountains’), and one of Becker’s longer poems in translation being published (‘Travel film; re-runs’ – see below).

Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, the writer often returned to his childhood landscape. I have concentrated my translation efforts on Becker’s 1993 poems in Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium, published by Suhrkamp. The full translation is due to be published by Shearsman Books in 2025. The Spender Trust Competition poem is a short piece which I can quote in full. The Competition requires entrants to say a few words about the poem and the translation process. Here is a video of the Intro and Reading of the poem for the prize event, and (alongside) the text that I originally submitted:

Commentary – The Ore Mountains lie along the Czech-German border. Borders are important in this poem. Born in the East German region, brought up in West Germany, after the fall of the Wall in 1990, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape. Though relatively brief, this poem is just one sentence, woven together with the conjunction ‘wie’ (translated here both as ‘how’ and ‘the way’). The weave is dense and it’s not possible to tell whether what is observed – the children, the oil spill, the tree stump (resembling a body) – are contemporaneous or from different eras. My translation keeps these possibilities open: borders here are temporal, as well as geographical. The German word ‘Avantgarde’ has artistic as well as political implications, but my choice of ‘vanguard’ also brings out the militaristic connotations which are reinforced by the ‘spitzen, grünen Lanzen’ (‘sharp, green spears’) which are swiftly transformed into a bunch of sprouting snowdrops. These flowers of Spring are referred to as a ‘Konvention’ and I retained the English equivalent, intending to suggest both a performance (something conventional, perhaps not genuine), as well as a political gathering or agreement (like the Convention on Human Rights). The ambiguity felt relevant. The final vivid, visual images – a TV screen seen through a window, a script on the screen, a woman talking, but inaudible to the observer – sum up Becker’s concerns about the media, political and historical change, borders real and imagined, exclusion, and the need to ask questions of those in power. Issues as real today as when the poem was written.

Meanwhile in the Ore Mountains

Sitting still, watching how the afternoon below

waits for the dusk, the way snipers vanish

behind the remains of a wall and children run

after a white, armoured vehicle, the way a line

of hills, which marks a boundary, divides

the nothingness of snow from the nothingness of sky,

and along the frontier, one this side, another

along the other, fly the only two crows

to be found in this treeless landscape, the way

the iridescent pattern of an oil spill develops

with darkening edges, the way a tree stump

in the field becomes the shape of a body with

severed arms and legs, how, under the cherry,

the vanguard shows with sharp, green spears,

which later, over the next few days, assumes

the convention of snowdrops, how dark windows

are lit by screens, and on each screen appears,

at first, lettering, and then the face of

a woman who is soundlessly moving her lips.

The longer poem – ‘Travel film; re-runs’ – which does indeed run to over 100 lines in full – has just appeared in The Long Poem Magazine, Issue 32, eds. Linda Black and Claire Crowther. This brilliant magazine is one of the few outlets for poems stretching beyond the ‘competition’ mark of 40/50 lines only. Poets/translators again have the opportunity to comment on the work being published. This was my Introductory paragraph:

Given his 1000 page Collected Poems (Suhrkamp, 2022), it’s remarkable that Jürgen Becker’s work has been so little translated into English. This poem, published in his 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium, is imbued with Becker’s sense of the changes in this particular part of Europe. The interleaving of the child’s and returning adult’s vision is what yields Becker’s characteristic poetic mode: a flickering between past and present, often without warning to the reader, a past frequently oppressed by the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The translator’s difficulties lie not in his word choices (Becker plainly describes, he states), but, to some degree, in his cultural references (here, the allusion to pimpf kids (cub, little rascal, little fart) is to members of the Hitler Youth), and, primarily, in dealing with his style of montage-composition, his commitment to ‘the apparently incidental’. Becker’s porous verse contains multitudes of perspectives, voices, inner and outer events, photos, maps, postcards, news, weather reports. In translation, it’s hard to flex, to permit these into English, and I have had to learn to trust Becker’s arrangements of them into long, semi-colon linked passages, utterly remote from conventional ‘lyric’. The opening 24 lines here elide landscape, weather, employment, domesticity, and history, then on to the natural world, compositional ideas, back to history. Becker is a great poet of the present moment and of the past. He grew up in Thuringia which, following World War II, lay in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, Becker’s family had moved to West Germany, and, after 1990, he often returned to these childhood landscapes. This poem was published in his 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Becker worked for many years in German radio, and, in this poem, we might imagine a small production team visiting an un/familiar landscape in the East, perhaps where a childhood was spent, a place later abandoned.

Travel film; re-runs (extract)

the landscape: like corrugated cardboard, an enduring, fixed

motion, on a smoky grey day. The wind came

somewhere from below, from a region beneath

the weather chart; in the evening, we could no longer

reach our correspondents. We drove out

to the country house; we ate

Spanish green asparagus. It was a moment

from yesterday that rolled slowly past the shelf

with its yellow calendars and diaries and pictures;

something had begun,

and you’re aware of it,

the sound of that reiteration. You can … and

you allow it … push the off button; outside the window,

the blackbird flutters up, simply waiting

to be mentioned. Now you notice the way the paint

has peeled from the window frame, and where

the ants are coming from, in January the only

living creatures in the house. Perseverance pays off

at some point, even if you have little alternative

but to gather piece after piece together. Paint pots

in the shed, shades of green and white, but

we are waiting for a consistent light,

on either side of the house. Is it too late now,

to leave again

… lake shores, before they are all

accounted for, can still be appreciated, with sandy paths

reaching the purple horizon … subjunctive, without end;

a game of evasion that you can watch until you

whistle, or shout, and it’s nothing like awakening

from a dream. In the evening, we light a fire; it’s

a sudden, impromptu decision; then follows

the next draft of the letter: your sketches litter the table

… you no longer need a pass; highways,

the middle of the village … standing beside you

on the jetty; on the opposite side, the yellow ribbon

of the shoreline…

clips from the travel film just now

set going in the blink of an eye; then the meadow

is mown; there are a few old clumps of snowdrops

we leave standing. The fact is, we have missed out

on the moment of adulthood, even if, in the evening,

you say: never, not once, did the door open, from

which a little something left, and what you are now

entered in. The contrast, the changes … the fear has

been networked, so many of these shortcomings went

into production. Piano, from beyond French windows,

Shostakovich plays Shostakovich, and the life story

draws a curve out towards the northeast. Ice floes,

accumulating along the coast; in boots and furs,

walking over the frozen river, passing pimpf kids,

and old men, and a young woman who’s most likely

Polish, and you’re not going to stop staring at her

any time soon; freezing cold on the sledge back home,

your mother doesn’t live here anymore; the whole scene

darkens under the smoke of an engine pulling

the fast train to Lusatia . . .

New Review of ‘Between a Drowning Man’ – from Shanta Acharya

September 16, 2024 martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry close analysis of poetry, Everybody's Reviewing, language as a bridge, poetry, Poetry Review, Rainer Maria Rilke, Salt Publishing, Seren Books, Shanta Acharya

We all know that reviews of poetry books can take a long time to filter through whatever system they do come through. But then they always come as a pleasant surprise (if that’s not making too many assumptions about their likely contents). Any way – almost 12 months after the appearance of my most recent full collection, Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023), the ever-lively site, Everybody’s Reviewing, has just posted a detailed and insightful commentary on the book by poet and novelist, Shanta Acharya.

Amongst other things, the review comments: ‘A poet, translator, reviewer and poetry blogger, Martyn Crucefix has won prizes for his poetry and translation. As a translator of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Laozi’s Daodejing, Huchel’s These Numbered Days, among others, Crucefix has been building bridges for those who want to cross the divide between cultures, countries, ways of seeing the world and each other. Words are bridges, language itself a bridge – yet we inhabit an increasingly complex world where loneliness and isolation are on the rise. In ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ an acceptance of this isolation is disconcerting: ‘you make a choice you go your own way … / because all the bridges are down.’ His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, is a fundamental aspect of his work’.

Here’s a link to the full review

And coincidentally, Seren Books have also just recently posted a rather older poem of mine in their Poem of the Week slot. This is from my 2017 collection with Seren, The Lovely Disciplines. It’s about visiting the opticians for a check-up – though also about the desire (my desire) for clarity and absoluteness (if there is such a word), a desire, of course, never to be fulfilled. Read the full poem here.

Review of ‘Modern Fog’ by Chris Emery (Arc Publications, 2024)

June 10, 2024 martyn crucefix brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, religious poetry, writing Adam Zagajewski, Arc Publications, church visiting, close analysis of poetry, Cromer, East Coker, hill walking, memento mori, Nature poetry, Norfolk, Norfolk Broads, Pentecost, Philip Larkin, Ranworth, spiritual poetry, St Andrew's church Wickhampton, St Helen's church, TS Eliot

Chris Emery’s most recent collection both presents, and intends to see beyond, the Modern Fog of its title. The poems revel in describing aspects of this world and – in keeping with the images on the book’s cover – the occasions for such descriptions arise from journeys (often walking – the cover shows a hand-holding rambling couple) and the highlights of such journeys are frequently encounters with creatures (the cover has a deer and a fox). So ‘The Path’ leads us past ‘chalk beds’ and ‘clay beds’ and ‘dirt paths’ to excited sightings of a jay and a buzzard. Presenting more of a pause in such a walk, ‘The Day Storm’ is composed largely of the poet’s characteristic ‘noticing’ of blackthorn, blackberry and nettle. But once the eponymous storm has passed, the trees are now found to be ‘gashed . . . / splintered’ and this gives rise to one of Emery’s most interesting observations that, in their damaged state, the trees are in some mysterious way ‘clarified’. More of this later.

There is more than a little of Philip Larkin in Emery’s work – particularly the detail-listing-Larkin of ‘Here’ and ‘To the Sea’. Emery’s ‘All the Routes Home’ offers us an inclusive list of a Roman road, a Viking lane, an unclear path, a Puritan track. The poem ‘The Bay’ might be read as a more condensed version of Larkin’s ‘Here’ as, ‘after hours of hill torture’, the trail walker arrives at a bay, dotted with ruined buildings: ‘the afterthought of winter crofting’. This image of transience, of ultimate human failure, in effect a memento mori, is softened a little with Emery’s insistence that the homesteads ‘still hold their ounce of love’. In contrast to Larkin, and reminiscent of those earlier ‘gashed’ trees (somehow being advantaged by their damage), Emery is reluctant to accept death as an absolute ending and it is in this that the reader will find indications of his religious belief.

Similar spiritual themes emerge in the many encounters these poems have with creatures. ‘The Buzzard’ is another hill walk on a ‘churchless’ afternoon, but the flight of the bird on its thermal suggests an upward aspiration, a craving that the human observers also ‘hope to crave’. There is a beautiful little poem ostensibly about a dove returning to its dovecot:

Small snatch of air, sole white arc,

crisp handclap, then ritual landing.

All followed by cossetting and fuss

at the stoop. The laughable dance

with lots of nodding and wittering

before the tricky hop up

to the dovecote . . .

The poem is transformed to something unconventionally angelic by being given the title ‘Pentecost’. The more lengthy ‘Day Fox’ vividly captures the ‘living amber’ of the creature against the green of grass, but its death at the roadside is equally clear: ‘his pelt was tar black and slicked back / on the tiny lump of him’. Here again, Emery goes a step or two beyond the plain facts of death as, in the corpse’s decomposition, ‘the world / relaxed into him with all its fiery prayers’. To suggest this is an image of an afterlife is to lack the poem’s own subtlety, but Emery is surely probing Eliot’s idea (not original to TSE) that ‘In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not’ (‘East Coker’). The remarkable poem ‘Stags’ does this more explicitly in that the momentary sighting of the creatures is (in the poem itself) now no more than a shaky memory, an ‘absence’ that stands ‘at the edge of what’s never / fully grasped’. But the recall of their passing still has a potency as a ‘store of grace and loss’ and is here declared ‘the last religion of these woods’.

But Emery is equally at home describing the ‘dreck’ of our modern world. It’s surely more this sort of thing that constitutes the ‘modern fog’ of the book’s title. There is an NCP car park, the final destination perhaps of the couple in ‘Newbies’ who are driving along ‘old roads, lobbed estates seeping / by the rim of each roundabout’. The tacky nature of modern life is also found in ‘Edgeworlds’ which encompasses 4x4s parked up beside a ‘ratty beach’ and coach tours, detergent-smelling corridors and TV reruns. But such scenes function in this book partly as a foil to the (again) Larkinesque ‘churchgoing’ side of Emery’s character. ‘The Wall Paintings’ – a visit to St. Andrew’s, Wickhampton in Norfolk – opens, not with cycle clips, but with the equally evocative ‘thunk of a latch and then your eyes adjust’. And far more monumentally, ‘At St Helen’s, Ranworth’ is a 12-part sequence (each shaped like the church’s tower) more explicitly contemplating the building’s impact on the poet’s religious experience.

I guess I’m more attuned to Emery’s art when he is working up from the roots of the secular and material world, as in ‘One Drive in Winter’, in which the travelling couple go beyond satnav reach, the petrol tank close to empty, beyond any very obviously attractive destination, yet they still discover something worthy of a return, something about themselves, an opportunity to ‘solemnise the marginal and lost’. It may be that the great churches of the Norfolk Broads are themselves part of the category of the ‘marginal and lost’ these days and I do admire Emery’s attempts to bring them back into contemporary poetry, but I find his more slantwise and paradoxically inclined images (evocative of ‘East Coker’s ‘In my end is my beginning’) more accessible emotionally. To give one more example, in ‘The Elders’ – a poem written in memory of Adam Zagajewski – Emery again deploys an image of trees damaged after a storm (this time perhaps more metaphorically damaged by ‘revolution’) and these oak limbs also ‘lie / broken with new life’.

This intriguing collection’s two concluding poems are perhaps variations on this same theme. ‘The Start of It’ is – here’s the paradox again – the beginning of the end prior to the beginning: in this poem we read of frank intimations of mortality, of moments when ‘something abstract stiffens in the grace’ of a life, when we may come to glimpse ‘the formal shape [we] make in time’. In a completely different mode, ‘The Legacy’ eventually reveals itself to be a poem about the gentle removal of an empty wasps’ nest, its ‘featherweight’ and ‘strange paper weather’. In the transformative effect of real poetry, the nest comes to be seen as a human life lived, ‘sad and gorgeously dented’, but from which the creatures that made it have departed to another place: ‘to drone in apple acres / elsewhere darkening / with sweet ruin now.’ Whether we believe in such a place – and the oxymoronic ‘sweet ruin’ casts a shadowy doubt – is, with writing as good as this, hardly the point, appealing as it does, through vivid imagery, confidently written, to a fundamental human longing for continuation in the face of what we think we know of the end of life.

Remembering John Burnside

June 1, 2024 martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, New British Poetry, poetry, religious poetry, writing Cape Poetry, close analysis of poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth

With yesterday’s announcement of John Burnside’s death, I thought of this review that I wrote in 2006 of his Selected Poems, published by Cape Poetry. His work meant a lot to me around that time and I enjoyed the chance to try to articulate what I found fascinating in it.

John Burnside’s poetry has, for some years now, been offering us a modern egotistical sublime. With Wordsworth, he shares a responsive delight in nature and daunting powers of self-analysis; also similarly, he can slip towards the prolix and portentous and there is something of the same difficulty with projection into another’s experience. But Burnside’s work frequently achieves a moving sublimity without loosening its grip on reality. He is the only contemporary poet who consistently demonstrates the power of a poetic form that is something other than mini fictional narrative, raw confessional, or condensed dramatic monologue. That he is also successful in writing prose makes his achievement all the more impressive.

His work was recognised in the early 1990s despite bucking the trends of secularism, formalism, and plain/street language. His poetry’s brooding intensity lacked laddish brouhaha. The palette was never broad – rural twilights, leaf litter, owls hunting, tracks across snow – but his eye was always on the margins of such things, where the human and the natural met and negotiated. It felt like something spiritual was about to be said or had been articulated and just missed. This was twinned with the powerfully felt absence of fixed personal identity that has remained so deeply engrained in his work. In poems that in many ways were hardly radical, it was this element that made Burnside feel modern. In a self-regarding culture ever more attached to the teats of mobility, individuality, celebrity and fashion, his relentless worrying away at the obscurity of the self, his flirting with its non-existence, struck dissonant but resonating chords.

Burnside’s themes are frequently disturbing. But in a poem like ‘Halloween’ (from The Myth of the Twin, published in 1994) his exquisite ability to conjure up the British countryside proves to be an essential part of the pleasure of reading him. As often, the season is autumn – cold, mostly deserted, snow, rain, “the fernwork of ice and water”. The narrator peels bark from a tree to smell “its ghost” in a characteristic movement from the precisely evoked physical to the almost casually implied spiritual. What the figure in the landscape is trying to do is to “define my place”. Even scraping down in the leaf mould, he finds fungal traces that look “like the first elusive threads / of unmade souls”. Nearby village bells provide “nothing” and the poem typically ends with the figure’s sense of “other versions of myself” on the periphery of vision and these can be taken to imply other futures, untaken pasts, other roles familiarly adopted, even selves beyond the physical – the inconclusiveness is the point.

Burnside has pursued experiments with differing perspectives that were first signalled by the opening and closing poems of The Myth of the Twin. For example, though in the end less successful than its predecessor, Swimming in the Flood (1995)dramatically broadened his poetry’s reach to include the experience of others, often in more extended form and in dramatic monologues. Persecutors and victims inhabit these poems and speak disturbingly of abuse and “the inexplicable / malice of being” (‘Schadenfreude’). This was a turning point in Burnside’s development as what now flooded into the poetry was what had lain buried in the delicacy and tentativeness of the earlier work. In the ‘The Old Gods’ he declares their power is strongest “when anger or fear / is fuzzing the surface, / making us dizzy and whole”. The process of uncovering is shown to be one of healing and this selection includes the sequence called ‘Burning a Woman’ which seems nakedly to speak of the poet’s mother and father. Equally, the ‘Parousia’ sequence (not included in this Selected) ends with what appear to be sceptical reflections on his earlier inquisition beyond the merely physical: “All resurrections are local . . ./ the sign I have waited to see / is happening now / and always”. Here Burnside seems to arrive at a sense of secular miracle (a version of Rilke’s “Hiersein ist herrlich”) less concerned with the reality of religious presence than with the individual’s response to its possibility.

And yet, the dramatic monologues proved something of a cul de sac. With his subsequent work, Burnside has returned to his best subject: himself. Partly what makes the award-winning The Asylum Dance such a magnificent achievement is the development of the fluid poetic form he combines with a second person plural address that achieves the universal without being either hectoring or twee. The influence of William Carlos Williams is obvious, but Burnside extends this beyond a fluent impressionism concerned with the truth of things to encompass a philosophical musing, the lines flickering across the page as if viewed through water. This new selection is too brief to achieve the full sense of his development, but one of the marvels of Burnside’s work is its continuing delivery of extraordinary evocations of the natural world that have become gradually melded with an introspective depth that does not merely offer insight, but sustained meditation. The four long sequences from The Asylum Dance are rightly given space here and constitute a masterpiece in which the poems offer up rich, disturbing, beautiful, precise, profound, and sustained experiences undergone in the act of reading, rather than a lesser poetry’s marshalling of moments of insight and feeling. Burnside’s career already provides ample proof of a fascinating and significant artistic development, and this selection will prove a good starting point for anyone not yet following it.