poetry competitions

Laurel Prize Shortlist 2025 – My Favourite Is….!

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The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order):

Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts
Eliza O’Toole A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Carol Watts Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)

It turns out I have reviewed two of these collections – one of them I have been bending the ears of anyone who will listen about how very very good it is. I reviewed Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books) for Poetry Salzberg Review fairly recently and posted an extended version of the review here. I concluded that ‘The people and landscapes of ‘Carboniferous’ are far more successful as poems to be read and enjoyed, while ‘Invisible Everywhere’ is a bold, well-intentioned experiment that fails’.

It is Eliza O’Toole’s A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books) that I have been telling everybody about. Interestingly – and demonstrating the great enthusiasm the publisher shares for this poet – Shearsman have just published her NEXT collection: Buying the Farm (a georgics of sorts). The nominated collection was published in 2024.

I reviewed it in brief for The Times Literary Supplement recently, as follows:

The premise of Eliza O’Toole’s superb debut collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, is unpromising: a year’s cycle of diaristic pieces in which the poet walks her dog through the Stour valley. But the result is a sublime form of ecopoetry which is visionary, yet creaturely and incarnate, and to achieve this O’Toole channels two great nineteenth century writers. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ joys in the things of Nature which are always ‘here and but the beholder / Wanting’. When self and natural world do communicate, Hopkins named that flash of true relationship ‘instress’.  O’Toole’s ‘Stour Owls’ records just such a moment, listening to the calls of a female tawny owl, the ‘slight pin-thin / hoot’ of the male, followed by a tense silence: ‘then the low slow of the barn owl as the / white slide of her glide brushes the air we / both hold & then breathe’ (12).

O’Toole also adopts Emerson’s idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’, seeing all, yet being itself ‘nothing’. The excision of the self’s perspective is systematically pursued. Seldom is the landscape ‘seen’ but is rather subject to plain statement: ‘It was a machine-gun of a morning’ (11), ‘a vixen-piss of a morning’ (13), ‘a muck spread of a morning’ (34). O’Toole has an extraordinarily observant eye, but this repeated trope counters any taint of the constructed picturesque, the human-centring of vanishing points and perspective. The observer grows ‘part or parcel’ of the world. Such a vision makes demands on language because in truth, ‘It is necessary / to write what cannot be written’ (94), and this yields one of the most exciting aspects of this collection as the poet deploys varieties of plain-speaking, scientific, ancient, and esoteric vocabularies as well as a Hopkinsesque ‘unruly syntax’. She describes ‘young buds. Just starting from / the line of life, phloem sap climbing, / a shoot apical meristem and post / zygotic. It was bud-set’ (26).

O’Toole’s choices about form are also bold, almost all the poems being both right and left justified, creating blocks (windows?) opening on each page. The realm the reader is invited into (not told about, not shown) is one where the manifold particularities of the natural world are also and at once a whole. O’Toole’s dog digs a hole: ‘In / the hole and out of it, the soil was / whole. There was a unity and no lack. / In the hole was soil. It was a / comprehensive various entirety; it / was a universe of relatings’. (38) In such ways O’Toole’s ordinaries are made ‘strange’ (33) and the toxic divide between modern humanity and the natural is momentarily, repeatedly, bridged.

Here’s one of the poems from A Cranic of Ordinaries. Apologies are due for formatting accuracy as – as we all know – WordPress is rubbish at dealing with poetry. But you’ll get the idea…..

Perpetual gravity – Box Tombs at Wiston

(the quality of appearing to recede, essential to the landscape tradition)

Now illegible, the children of John

Whitmore and Susanna his wife,

Sarah aged 11 Months,

Robert aged 2 Years,

Rebeckah aged 11 Months,

Elizabeth aged …. Weeks,

Lucy aged 1 Week,

Susanna aged 20 Years,

Thomas Aged 6 Years.

John Whitmore departed this life Jany

the ….6th 1746 Aged (6)6. He was a

good husband loving father faithful

friend and a Good Christian. Susanna

Whitmore died / Jany. 25 1789 Aged

(?8)6. To dwell until all the world

inscribed when it was still possible to

die. To lie slightly foxed, mortared in

a brick box irregularly repaired, alive

with stone-devouring lichen and

littered with dry lime, leaves and

frass. Fin* pees antimony and sees off

the squirrel, wards off unbelievers we

have no need for having no place

amongst toppling tombs. A litany

indescribable, a conjugation beyond

reach, an accent mark over a vowel,

an entire landscape made grave. It

was October, the same fields were

ditched, furrowed, carved, still dug

over and still the Stour was flowing. In

the picture’s distant plain, the sun

like other yellows, was still fading.

Generally, a history remains unsure.

*O’Toole’s dog

The Laurel Prize awards £5,000 for the winner of the prize and £1,000 for the other four finalists – so congratulations are due to all of them. The winner will be announced at the Laurel Prize Ceremony which is taking place on Friday 19 September at 5.30pm (BST), and will be aired via a free live-stream. This year’s ceremony is a part of BBC Contains Strong Language which takes place in Bradford from 18-21 September.

Katrina Porteous’ most recent Bloodaxe collection, ‘Rhizodont’, reviewed.

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An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it. The collection, Rhizodont, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2024.

The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago. It’s thought to be the first creature to transition from water to land and hence the ancestor of all four-limbed vertebrates (including humans). The poems here are divided into two superficially very separate books (titled ‘Carboniferous’ and ‘Invisible Everywhere’) but what Porteous insists holds them together is her exploration of this notion of transition. As ‘#rhizodont’ puts it, ‘We’re all on a journey’, and the ambition of this book touches upon transformations various: geological, natural, industrial, cultural (and linguistic) and technological. There can be no faulting the ambition of this and there are many fine poems, though Porteous insists on Notes explaining a great deal of what she is doing/writing about which gives the whole a rather teacherly quality that will divide her readership. Here’s the title poem in full, plus a video of the author reading it:

#rhizodont

Then, in a flash,

It claps shut – an ambush –

Teeth, fangs, tusks – crunch, rip,

x

Snap. The rhizodont,

Dragging itself out of water.

The old world sinks and slips

x

Beneath its tilted strata.

We’re all on a journey.

This one’s about us

x

Unearthing ourselves from a place –

Somatic, interlaced –

To be conjured from light, and sent

x

Invisible, everywhere,

For everyone to possess.

The children stare at their phones,

x

A fervent, lit up,

Incorporeal congregation,

Some deep, residual

x

Root in a life everlasting

Outlasting them, like a fossil

Sarcopterygian fish.

The longer ‘Carboniferous’ section is loosely glued together by a geographical journey from the former coalmining communities of East Durham, moving up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island. This is familiar territory, important to Porteous’ earlier collections, and she again writes well (with great local knowledge) of the geological conditions that have eventually given rise to the important fishing and mining industries (and cultural communities) in the area. Both industries are now in decline and in ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’, while the older folk still use ‘old words’ (like stobbie, skyemmie, and gowdspink), the younger generation ‘checks in with Insta before school’. This also illustrates Porteous’ belief that the post-war generations’ transition ‘from analogue to digital technologies’ is a particularly dividing and challenging shift such that ‘the analogue island we lived on’, will seem as incomprehensible as ‘Latin and Greek’ to future generations (‘Hermeneutics’).

The poems also portray the natural wildlife of the region – dragonflies, sandhoppers, crabs and a wide variety of birds and plants. Despite coastal erosion and industrial pollution, Porteous focuses on such ‘small and local’ species as have been around for (often) millions of years. The glowworms in ‘Tiny Lights’ are ‘alien, ancient’ and for most residents of the area, completely ignored, though their continuing existence offers some sense of a continuity amidst vast change. The sounds and sights of the birds in ‘Goldcrests’ are marvellously observed, and they serve both to mark the season and, ‘bringing // Wildness’, they remind us of the natural world’s wider perspectives. The ‘Grey Heron’ is likewise superbly captured in the course of 18 shortish lines, but does the poem really need its 25 line prose Note, detailing the setting’s geographical history, the life cycle of Atlantic salmon, conservation measures being taken and the poet’s intention to place ‘the timeless drama of the ‘prehistoric’ grey heron against [the town of] Amble’s history, first as a coal port then as a salmon fishing harbour, and depict the bird as an explorer, venturing into Amble’s still-to-be-decided future’? I’m not convinced, though you don’t have to read them, and it’s true Porteous’ stated intent is merely to inform, and stimulate further reading.

But can a poet’s commitment and enthusiasm spill over too much? Rhizodont contains 111 pages of poetry and 30 pages of Notes and explicatory Introduction, containing lots of interesting facts and figures, but also a good deal of over-explanation as in the Note to the poem ‘Wishbone’: ‘The poem juxtaposes recent cultural evolution with this enormous timescale, and asks what we, with our plastic waste, will leave behind us’. Most poets would leave such interpretation up to the reader and Porteous’ (admirable) compulsion to write about things she believes are important, is also conducive to poems being written under less than compelling conditions, perhaps to fill a gap in a sequence, or to make a point not yet covered elsewhere. It’s almost certainly deliberately excluded, but this reader misses a bit more of the poet’s involvement, either personally, as in ‘Begin Again’ in which, confronted with the vastness of geological time and Nature’s endurance, the speaker’s suddenly ‘ glad / Of tea-cups, hands, companionable laughter’, or of the poet’s love of words and music as in the several balladlike pieces included here ( like ‘The Tide Clock’ and ‘Low Light’).

The collection’s second section ‘considers aspects of the latest waves of industrial and technological revolution’ and, rather than dwelling on alternative energy sources, Porteous writes about technologies which ‘extend human senses and reasoning’, by which she means remote sensing devices, robotics, autonomous systems and AI. She is unusually optimistic about such developments, arguing (in poems and Notes) that such technology will be used to ‘understand more’ about the world we live in (but there’s precious little here about the commercial exploitation of such developments). And the poems themselves? They often suffer from the abstract nature of scientific terminology and don’t convincingly convey much emotion about the tech. It’s interesting how often personification / anthropomorphism is used in these poems; the Antarctic ice speaks, or is spoken to, and here is the voice of a Miniature Robot for Restricted Access Exploration (‘MIRRAX’): ‘Omnidirectional – versatile, nimble, [I] glide / On four independent wheels, weasel my way / In continual metamorphosis, changing form, // Amorphous’. Other poems versify descriptions of analytical processes (‘Sample Analysis on Mars’) or praise certain aspects of the natural world from which science gains understanding (‘Cosmogenic Nuclide’, ‘Basal Shear’). It is this ingenuity that is the point, but the poems fall short on informativeness (hence the need for Notes), but also fall short on emotional engagement (poetry?), failing in the end to convey Porteous’ stated intention: to reflect ‘in awe and wonder that human consciousness is able to gather and interpret [all this] information’ [my italics]. The people and landscapes of ‘Carboniferous’ are far more successful as poems to be read and enjoyed, while ‘Invisible Everywhere’ is a bold, well-intentioned experiment that fails.

Three Poems by Jürgen Becker

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Following on from the publication in January 2025 of my translation of ‘Dressel’s Garden’, one of Jürgen Becker’s longer poems (which recently appeared on the USA site Asymptote Journal), three more poems by this fascinating German poet have just appeared in Shearsman magazine and our hope is (permissions permitting etc) that Shearsman Books will be publishing a full collection of his work in the near future. All these poems are taken from Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. The newly published poems are relatively brief so I thought I’d post two them here with a little bit of literary and historical context. (I’ll comment in a later post on the longest of the three poems now published by Shearsman).

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Collected Poems (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’ Likewise, in their adjudication, the 2014 Büchner Prize jury highlighted the way ‘Becker’s writing is interwoven with the times, with what is observed and what is remembered, what is personal and what is historical.’ Jürgen Becker’s own personal journey began on July 10, 1932, on Strundener Strasse, in Cologne. In August 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war, his father was transferred from his place of work in Cologne to Erfurt in Central Germany. This was the beginning of the seven-year-old Becker’s experience of war and a post-war childhood in Thuringia. In 1947, the family left Erfurt and returned to West Germany. Becker has said about this period that there was never any thought of wanting to travel to the Eastern zone, let alone to the GDR, to see the places and landscapes where he’d spent his childhood years: ‘For a long time, I oriented myself solely towards western horizons; I lived, so to speak, with my back to the GDR; my childhood was separated by a border, seemingly closed’. (More of borders in a moment).

Becker’s interest in ‘events’ – political and historical – can clearly be seen in the short poem ‘Reporter’. Its subject never seems to become outdated (as I write this, Turkey is enforcing a crackdown on reporting – see the arrest and deportation of BBC reporter, Mark Lowen, very recently). Becker’s poem is not set in any particular time period, though the allusion to a ‘vast thing, fading away’ suggests an epoch of great change, one political system fading, another on the rise. I love the journalist’s reported observation that he ‘can only leave / when nothing else happens’. In Becker’s writing, there is always something else arising (history does not stop happening – as we see in this particularly fast-moving historical moment). I take the implication of the final 4 words to suggest that the reporter may well be ‘removed’ by the authorities from whatever the situation currently is (against his wishes by the sound of it) and that we will all become the poorer for that, more poorly informed, less capable of distinguishing the truth of things: ‘He will be missed’.

Reporter

He barely looks at the camera; it almost seems

as if he’s talking to himself, a correspondence

with something on the unseen table, perhaps

with the pencil, the cigarette.

A slight tremor in the hands … who knows; anyway,

very likeable, nothing specific, more a murmur,

what can you say … cold weather and glimpses

along a street which is illuminated a little

by the snowfall; a leftover flag being stirred

by a wind machine. A vast thing, fading away

slowly … it has already disappeared, even before

a decree. He repeats it: he can only leave

when nothing else happens. He will be missed.

x

The second poem, ‘Meanwhile in the Ore Mountains’, bears strong similarities in that the specific time period (though not the setting) is left deliberately vague, though so many of the details in the poem possess a terrific (terrifying?) resonance for our own times. As to place, the Ore Mountains lie along the Czech-German border and borders are important in this poem. As I mentioned above, Becker was born in the eastern region of Germany, but from age 7, he was brought up in West Germany, and after the fall of the Wall in 1990, he’d often return to his (eastern) childhood landscape. The resulting blending of a child’s and adult’s vision is what gives rise to Becker’s characteristic poetic mode: a flickering between past and present, often without clear signalling, the past frequently haunted by the disturbing changes that happened in Germany in the 1930s. I’ll post the original German of this poem as well, as in what follows I’ll make a few observations about translation.

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 as I’ve suggested it’s not really 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 felt to be 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 then swiftly transformed into a bunch of sprouting snowdrops. These flowers of Spring are interestingly 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 very relevant (and once again topical).

The final vivid, visual images – a TV screen observed through a window, a script on the screen, a woman talking, but she is 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 in the early 1990s.

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.

x

Zwischendurch im Erzgebirge

Still sitzen und sehen, wie unten der Nachmittag

die Dämmerung erwartet, wie Scharfschützen hinter

einem Mauerrest verschwinden und Kinder

einem weißen gepanzerten Fahrzeug nachlaufen, wie

eine Hügellinie, die eine Grenzlinie ist, das Nichts

des Schnees vom Nichts des Himmels trennt, und

entlang der Grenze, die eine diesseits, die andere

jenseits, fliegen die beiden einzigen Krähen, die

es in dieser baumlosen Landschaft gibt, wie

das changierende Muster eines Ölteppichs entsteht

mit dunkler werdenden Rändern, wie auf der Wiese

ein Baumstumpf die Form eines Körpers annimmt mit

abgeschlagenen Armen und Beinen, wie unterm Kirschbaum

sich die Avantgarde zeigt, mit spitzen, grünen Lanzen,

die später, in den nächsten Tagen, die Konvention

der Schneeglöckchen annimmt, wie in dunklen Fenstern

Bildschirme aufleuchten und auf jedem Bildschirm

zuerst eine Schrift und dann das Gesicht einer Frau

erscheint, die lautlos die Lippen bewegt.

Impressions of the TS Eliot Prize Readings 2025

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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 14th 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)

Two Poems by the late Jürgen Becker

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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 . . .

A Run of Readings in October/November

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Talk to whomsoever (among the poets you may know) and a common theme is just how hard it can be to get invitations to read. It really is hard going and for those of us – most of us – who have an aversion to the push and flaunt that is required – it can even feel quite painful. But do it we must. So it’s really nice when it produces a few results. This, by way of saying that I have a few appearances – brief in the main – not as headline reader – coming up at the end of this month and the opening of November. A couple of these readings are translation-related, two others are to mark the publication of extracts from some more experimental work (in original poetry) that I have been pursuing in the last couple of years. I’m particularly happy that these more ‘odd’ compositions have found such warm responses and it makes me think I ought to be looking to publish them in full. Though I have another, other book sitting ready to go… publishers??

Some more event details….

On 26th October, 2pm, at The Library, Conway Hall, London, as part of the Small Publishers Fair, Wivenhoe-based Dunlin Press will be launching four new pamphlets of writing: Kathmandu by Andrew Shaw, Bomb by Samuel Reid, From Stone to Clay to Butter by Lily Petch, and A Raven on a Writing Desk by Julie Hogg. These talented people were the winners of the Press’ 2024 competition for experimental writing. Sad to say, I’ll not actually be reading here, but some of my work is included in the accompanying anthology (those who just missed out I like to think!). My contribution is an extract from A Shout Across Dursey Sound, a sequence of poems set on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland. The anthology’s title is Objects (buy it here) and it includes work by Galia Admoni, MW Bewick ,Emma Bolland, Richard Capener, Tessa Foley, Anthony Ogbonnaya Chukwu, Richard Skinner, Isabella Streffen, and others.

Then, on Wednesday, 30th October, 6pm-9pm, I’m off to Oxford to read for the Oxford Poetry Circle, as announced in a previous post. This is taking place at Common Ground, on Little Clarendon Street, Oxford. There, I’ll be reading work in translation only – from my recent Rilke book published by Pushkin Press (reviewed here on The Friday Poem by Victoria Moul) and from my 2019 Shearsman Books collection of poems by Peter Huchel. I’m particularly pleased to be reading on this occasion with the brilliant and super-industrious translator, academic and friend, Karen Leeder. Other readers are Alex Murdoch and Laia Watkins – and there will be readers from the floor.

A couple of days later, the evening of Friday 1st November, I will be reading from a second experimental sequence of my own poems at the launch reading for Steve Ely’s anthology called Apocalyptic Landscape (Valley Press). My poems, a sequence called Olga Liking Sunflowers, roam through the pandemic experience, the work of David Jones, my local landscape and the delights (or otherwise) of social media. Contributors were encouraged to generate visionary responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene in the context of landscapes important to them. I will be reading alongside Steve, Jill Abram (who is organising the London launch for the book), as well as Katy Evans-Bush, JP Seabright, Anita Pati, and Caroline Maldonado. Steve Ely is also reading from his book Orasaigh, a collaboration between Steve and photographer Michael Faint, inspired by the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale. This event will take place upstairs at the Devereux pub, 20 Devereux Ct, London WC2R 3JJ. Doors open 6:30, Poetry starts 7pm FREE event.

Finally, I have also been lucky enough to have a translated longer poem (by the contemporary German poet Jürgen Becker) accepted to appear in Issue 32 of The Long Poem Magazine and I will be reading ‘Travel film: re-runs’ at their launch event in the afternoon of Saturday 16th November 1.30 to 3.45, at the Barbican Library, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2 8DS. Other readers will be: Angela Gardner, Charlie Baylis, Sue Burge, Sharon Holm, Claire Cox, Sian Thomas, Peter Robinson, Khaled Hakim, Timothy Ades, Julian Stannard. FREE ENTRY and there will be a short interval for sales and chats. Refreshments are available downstairs from the Barbican Cafe and Bar. I hope to see you at one or another of these events. I’ll leave you with a few lines from my sequence in Steve Ely’s apocalyptic anthology:

Olga likes my post of the tall sunflowers in the square.

Through google translate, her post in Russian reads: adrenaline is my doping.

I draw for the soul.

x

There are hundreds of images of herself. Some with wild animals.

Surely, they’re not really wild.

In a zoo. Under lock and key.

x

Others touch the hem of the pornographic.

Others look like cheap advertisements for luxury cars.

The kind of posts, I wonder, that end with an offer of marriage from the viewer.

x

Another shows her bald headed, holding a snake, just weeks after the remission of her illness.

x

I want to ask her: what was the exact nature of the disease?

I want to ask her.

What mark will this make in history?

x

I want to ask her. When will this stop?

     

‘My mother’s care home room as Cleopatra’s monument’ – an unpublished poem @ The Poetry Archive

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The Poetry Archive has recently been calling for submissions for what they are calling Poetry Archive Now. They are searching for poems written during 2023 as follows:

We want you to have the opportunity to join the Poetry Archive collections by recording yourself reciting or reading your poem out loud and sending it to us to care for and share worldwide. 20 poets will be chosen to join the Poetry Archive Now! WordView 2023 Collection and hundreds more will be curated, archived and shared in our YouTube collections with the millions of people who visit and love the Archive. Poetry offers a vital reflection of the age we live in. We would love you to join our collections to offer inspiration, comfort and the sheer lift-of-spirits which listening to fantastic poetry being read out loud can bring.

One of the few benefits of scrolling through social media – all too conscious of the gloom that can set in when confronted with (what appears to be) every other person/poet in the world having such marvellous successes – is that one comes across these calls for submission. Happily, the poem I videoed and sent in has become one of the ‘hundreds more’ and recently been posted on YouTube. I thought I’d share it here.

Hard to say where the juxtaposition of the last days of my mother’s life and Cleopatra’s final moments (as presented in Shakepeare’s Antony and Cleopatra) came from. But the scene is one I have often taught and found immensely moving. Charmian is one of the Egyptian queen’s handmaidens (friends more like). Cleopatra applies the asp (poisonous snake) to her breast and within a few minutes Charmian does the same:

  • Charmian. O eastern star!
  • Cleopatra. Peace, peace!
    Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
    That sucks the nurse asleep?
  • Charmian. O, break! O, break!
  • Cleopatra. As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle,—
    O Antony!—Nay, I will take thee too.
    [Applying another asp to her arm]
    What should I stay—

[Dies]

  • Charmian. In this vile world? So, fare thee well.
    Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies
    A lass unparallel’d. Downy windows, close;
    And golden Phoebus never be beheld
    Of eyes again so royal! Your crown’s awry;
    I’ll mend it, and then play.

The text of my poem appears below the video recording.

My mother’s care home room as Cleopatra’s monument

I sit behind door 16

in a room the size

of my son’s student room

though it is the old

who are sheltered here

x

and from the only chair

I watch the sun’s rays

through the only window

pierce the canopy

of the tall beech trees

x

that line the park

alongside this building

sunshine through glass

and over the sill

onto a blue plastic jug

x

its blue plastic cup

of barely touched water

a single birthday card

from her grandchildren

a Christmas cactus

x

and her bracelet watch

catches a glint

and a glint on the foil

of today’s medication

these few objects

x

are telling the time

as the sunlight rakes

beyond the trees

an Easter Island profile

gaunt and beaked

x

propped up in bed

on the plastic-wrapped

single mattress

the rucked-up sheet

of scroll and shadow

x

as the sun travels

falling into the west

I keep my vigil

with all the helpless-

ness of Charmian

x

at the cooling feet

of her Queen

the asp flung down

beneath the only chair

there has ever been

‘The Man Overstanding’ – on Raymond Antrobus’ ‘All The Names Given’

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Genuinely acclaimed first books can be hard to follow up. Raymond Antrobus’ The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and won the Ted Hughes Award and the Rathbone’s Folio Prize in 2019. I reviewed the book that year as one of the five collections shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis First Collection Prize. In many ways it was a conventional book of poems – its voice was colloquial, it successfully employed a range of (now) traditional forms (dramatic monologues, prose poem, sestina, ghazal, pantoum), its syntax and punctuation were nothing out of the ordinary. Its subject matter was to a large extent dominated by a son’s difficult relationship with his father, by questions of racial identity and (this is what made it especially distinctive) the experience of a young Deaf man. Besides the latter, what really marked the book out (I argued) was ‘that impossible-to-teach, impossible-to-fake, not especially ultra-modern quality of compassion’. Listen to Raymond Antrobus talking about his first collection here.

Now several years on and literary acclaim, a new publisher (this book is published by Picador Poetry – Penned in the Margins has since sadly ceased operations), a recent marriage and a broadening of perspective (particularly towards the USA) all place Antrobus in a very different environment. He has set aside a lot of the experimentation with recognised forms (which is not to say the new poems do not experiment with poetic form) and the book opens very positively:

Give thanks to the wheels touching tarmac at JFK,

give thanks to the latches, handles, what we squeeze

x

into cabins, the wobbling wings, the arrivals,

departures, the long line at the gates, the nerves held,

x

give thanks to the hand returning the passport [. . .]

In a similar tone, ‘The Acceptance’ concludes with the word ‘Welcome’ being signed. But the 30 lines preceding this hark back to that ‘complicated man’ (a phrase from ‘Dementia’, from The Perseverance), the poet’s father. Though dead for several years now, he continues to haunt his son’s dreams and a number of these new poems. In ‘Every Black Man’, the ‘dark dreadlocked Jamaican father’ meets his prospective, English mother-in-law for the first time. He’s already drunk, there is shouting, he lashes out, she racially insults him: they never meet in the same room again. The father’s ‘heartless sense of humour’ is turned into a slow blues: ‘I think that’s how he handled pain, drink his only tutor’ (‘Heartless Humour Blues’). And the man’s ‘complication’ is reaffirmed in the poem, ‘Arose’, in which, talking to his embarrassed son, the father boasts of the great sex had with the boy’s mother, but then is touchingly remembered, calling out her name: ‘Rose? And he said it like something in him / grew towards the light.’

But All The Names Given also pays more fulsome tribute to Antrobus’ mother. In ‘Her Taste’, despite her conventional, English, religious background, she drops out, joins a circus (literally, I think!), has various relationships, and eventually gets pregnant by Seymour, the ‘complicated man’ from Jamaica, who left her to raise the children. Thirty years on, she’s defiant, independent, ‘holding her head higher at seventy’. We see her leafing through a scrapbook of her past, ‘rolling a spliff on somebody’s balcony’ or again, ‘in church reading Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I’m Not a Christian’.’ Despite such moments, the maternal portrait does not quite possess the vivid distinctiveness of the paternal one. But, with the benefit of the passing years, Antrobus can now write, ‘On Being A Son’, in which he unreservedly praises Rose in her neediness, her self-sufficiency, her helplessness with IT, her helpfulness in so much else. He concludes, channelling her voice: ‘mother / dyes her hair, / don’t say greying / say sea salt / and cream’.

This greater focus on the mother is partly a redressing of the previous book’s gender imbalance, but it is also at one with Antrobus’ interest in family and heritage as offering clues to his own identity. It turns out the Antrobus name – from his mother’s English side – is anciently English (or far distantly Norse) and associated with Antrobus in Cheshire. ‘Antrobus or Land of Angels’ records a visit (by mother and son) to the place, to face the suspicious looks in The Antrobus Arms, the guard dogs at the Hall:

A farmer appears, asks if we’re descended

from Edmund Antrobus.

x

Sir Edmund Antrobus, (3rd baronet)

slaver, beloved father,

over-seer, owner of plantations

x

in Jamaica, British Guiana and St Kitts.

Peter Tosh with Robbie Shakespeare, 1978

The son’s quick denial of the line of descent is a complex moment. Despite carrying the same name, his mother is not truly a descendant. But given His Lordship’s slave-owning history, who is to say whether there is any genetic relation, ironically, through his Jamaican-born father, Seymour. The thought surfaces in ‘Horror Scene as Black English Royal (Captioned)’. Antrobus’ note tells us this poem was sparked by tabloid/CNN speculations in 2019 about the likely ‘blackness’ of the Sussexes’ royal baby. The poem’s narrator looks down at his own hands and sees ‘your great-great-great Grandfather’s owner’s hands’.

Tyrone Givans

So All The Names Given quickly reveals itself to be a book deeply troubled by the kinds of questions raised in the poem ‘Plantation Paint’: ‘Why am I like this? // What am I like? / Who does / it matter to?’ In this second book, Antrobus is still working towards an ‘overstanding’. The idea was alluded to in The Perseverance via a Peter Tosh lyric: ‘love is the man overstanding’. It is a form of understanding that emerges after all untruths have been overcome. The truths, untruths and complications of identity preoccupy the majority of these new poems. Only occasionally does Antrobus set aside such profound (perhaps irresolvable) anxieties. The African/Vietnamese waitress in ‘A Short Speech Written on Receipts’ is a figure who seems to outweigh the poet’s wrangling over his own selfhood, leading him to wonder: ‘Maybe kindness is how / you take down the stalls’. The gates of compassion also open frankly and to great effect in ‘At Every Edge’ and ‘A Paper Shrine’, two brief poems remembering very different students in creative writing classes. Likewise, ‘For Tyrone Givans’, commemorates a young Deaf man (a friend and contemporary of Antrobus) who committed suicide in Pentonville Prison in 2018. Here too, the vector of attention is outwards, towards Tyrone’s mistreatment by the authorities, his suffering and despair, rather than inwards towards the poet’s own ‘complications’:

Tyrone, the last time I saw you alive

I’d dropped my pen

on the staircase

x

didn’t hear it fall but you saw and ran

down to get it, handed it to me

before disappearing, said,

x

you might need this.

This review was originally commisioned and published by The High Window

Upcoming Zoom Reading by Martyn Crucefix

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Oxford Stanza 2

Reading and Open Mic – Zoom Meeting

Date: Monday, May 24th

Time: 7pm

Martyn Crucefix is our headline reader. His recent publications include Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019), These Numbered Days, translations of the poems of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019), which won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation prize 2020, and The Lovely Disciplines (Seren, 2017). O. at the Edge of the Gorge was also published by Guillemot Press in 2017. Martyn has translated the Duino Elegies – shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation – and Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke and the Daodejing – a new version in English (Enitharmon, 2016). He is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library and blogs regularly on poetry, translation and teaching at http://www.martyncrucefix.com

  • Main Reader – Martyn will read both original poems and from his Schlegel-Tieck Translation prizewinning book of Peter Huchel’s work.
  • Questions and answers
  • Interval
  • Open mic poets

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84012338448?pwd=R0FCdS8ra3BVUjQrNFBWL1Jick00QT09

Meeting ID: 840 1233 8448

Passcode: 807313

For further information, please contact: kathleenmcphilemy@gmail.com

Louise Gluck’s Poetry: Whole But Not Final

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Lots of hits in the last 24 hours on my earlier blog post about Louise Gluck. Being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature tends to have that effect… She’s a fascinating writer, always experimenting, but Anne Carson or Claudia Rankine would have come before her on my list. But given the obvious interest in her work, I’m posting here the text of the review I wrote for Poetry London in 2014 of Gluck’s last (ie. latest, though 6 years old now) book, Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet). The review was paired with Michael Longley’s The Stairwell (Cape, 2014).

Louise Gluck’s comments on George Oppen remain one of the best ways into her own poetry. In praising Oppen, she declares her own hand: “I love white space, love the telling omission [. . .] find oddly depressing that which seems to have left out nothing. Such poetry seems to love completion too much, and like a thoroughly cleaned room, it paralyses activity” (Proofs and Theories, Carcanet, 1994). The homely metaphor here is also characteristic. She shares with Oppen (and surprisingly with Longley) a preference for what is singular, common, small, for “solid nouns”, a language restored “to natural health [. . .] for common use”, rather than a Stevensian “hermetic patois” (‘On George Oppen’ ). So her style has been variously called spare, stripped down, deflated, thinned (especially so since Ararat (1990)). Yet the miraculous paradox her poems evoke is suggested by a further observation from 1994, that “precision is not the opposite of mystery”. Gluck’s dreamlike, enigmatic narratives are all the more powerful – convincing one might say – precisely because of the directness, plainness of her language.

It’s appropriate then that in her new book one of the protagonists paints canvases which are “immense and entirely white” (‘The White Series’). There is mystery enough in this new collection which (as often with Gluck) gestures towards a narrative but whose narrators switch gender, are much concerned with parents (who have perhaps died in a car crash), a caring aunt, a brother (perhaps a sister). These are scenes from (at least one) life. The dominant voice is that of a male artist who, after a career interruption, begins to paint white on a visit to America. He takes on a nephew as a companion as he approaches death. In ‘A Summer Garden’, he discovers a photo of his mother slipped into a translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and a studied, fin de siècle fastidiousness over language surfaces in many poems. Gluck’s novelistic skills in drawing a world in a few strokes and character in even fewer are evident, though once again action is missing; Gluck’s characters, whether male or female, are passive.

Like Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach, Gluck’s figures contemplate mortality while turning over their past. Though less obviously personal and less contented, as with Longley, the term nunc dimittis seems appropriate. The loss of parental figures is a recurrent trope and in ‘An Adventure’ love too is stripped away in a vain hope of “profound discoveries”. Poetry is lost too, again anticipating “the vast territory / opening to us with each valediction”. In A Village Life (2009), such a via negativa was doubted as “illumination / of the kind [that] destroys / creatures who depend on things” (‘Bats’) and here too it seems ineffectual. The quasi-Victorian cosiness evoked by the book’s title is exposed as false as remembered days “become unstable”, time leaps to and fro, seemingly at random and, if the soul travels at all, the puzzle remains that it always returns “empty-handed”:

[. . .] there is no perfect ending.

Indeed, there are infinite endings.

Or perhaps, once one begins,

there are only endings.

                                                                        ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’

This is a bleak world not unfamiliar to readers of Gluck. In 1985 she asked, “Why love what you will lose?” only to answer, “There is nothing else to love” (From the Japanese’). Here, her real subject is the way we create our own meanings. ‘Afterword’ reflects on an earlier poem in the collection, suspicious of the “instinct / [to] discern a shape, the artist in me / intervening to stop traffic, as it were”. A meeting with an old woman yields the anticipation “that some important secret / was about to be entrusted” but on reflection her words are “pointless” (‘A Sharply Worded Silence’). Gluck (again like Longley) has used Homeric and Greek mythic material to ironise her more contemporary subjects. Faithful and Virtuous Night instead makes reference to T H White’s The Sword in the Stone to evoke the same kind of focused, watershed moment, indubitably saturated with meaning that the events of her narrator’s lives lack. Even the analyst’s couch offers nothing more than “my ingenuity versus / his evasiveness: our little game” (’The Sword in the Stone’).

In recent years, the Italian settings of Averno (2006) and A Village Life have seemed to warm Gluck’s empathy, developing a more dramatic quality to her work in portraits less obviously autobiographical. This new collection perhaps reverts, but still she engages and moves her readers and there do seem to be eventual gains along this apparently bleak road. These lie in the poems’ openness, the way they seem capable of encompassing such varieties of experience, of saying ‘yes’. Of Oppen, she wrote that his work had the power to seem “simultaneously, whole and not final, the power to generate, not annul, energy”. As in sitting before a Samuel Beckett drama, the paradox is we are not drained of energy by the apparently fruitless search for meaning, but are thrown back onto the road all the more attuned to the clues, to the activity demanded of us. In his last days, Gluck’s artist has his nephew sing Jacques Brel’s ‘The Old Folks’ (“The little cat is dead and no more do they sing“) as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘The Hills are Alive’. The insight is that “we do not, in the main, need to choose between them” (‘The White Series’).

To end at the beginning, Faithful and Virtuous Night opens with ‘Parable’ in which, “as St. Francis teaches”, a group of people divest themselves of worldly goods, better to focus on their goals, better to move unencumbered towards them. But the direction of travel is unclear, as is their purpose. Much debate ensues; time passes. In the background, perhaps we hear Brel’s “old silver clock” ticking. The group grows old in debate and their ageing (some believe) is their true purpose, while others believe the passage of time is the truth they hoped to be revealed. Both seem satisfied and perhaps we need not choose between them, only admire Gluck’s precise evocation of the mystery.