political poetry

George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry

martyn crucefix brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, political poetry, post-colonial writing, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

x

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

x

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’

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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.

x

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.

x

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.

x

In allen Brücken, drunter uns die Zille

Hindurchgebracht, ertönten die Signale

Gleichwie in Trommeln wachsend in der Stille.

x

Wir ließen los und trieben im Kanale

An Gärten langsam hin. In dem Idylle

Sahn wir der Riesenschlote Nachtfanale.

x

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.

x

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.

x

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.

x

We cut loose, went drifting along the canal,

gradually, between gardens, glimpses of

the vast chimneys’ night-flares in the idyll.

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?

     

Ian Brinton reviews ‘Between a Drowning Man’

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Here is Ian Brinton‘s recent review of my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man. It was first published by Litter Magazine in January 2024.

The invitation at the opening of these two remarkable sequences of poems by Martyn Crucefix emphasises both ‘difference’ and ‘ambiguity’, an ‘othering’ which hones attention rather than dulling it.

Divided into two sections, Works and Days (forty-nine poems) and O, at the Edge of the Gorge (fourteen poems) the two landscapes bring into focus a post-2016 Britain and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. The leitmotif which threads its pathway, its recurring echo, through the first section is of ‘all the bridges’ being ‘down’ and the epigraph to section two is a quotation from Canto 16 of Dante’s Paradiso in which cities pass out of existence through warfare or disease and that which may have seemed permanent is continuously in movement. That second section of poems is a sequence of sonnets and in the final one the hawk’s resting place in the ‘shivering of poplars’ sways so that he is neither falling nor at ease

with these thinnest of airs beneath him

these shapes of loose knotted mesh

these whisperings that cradle him on a whim

That ‘othering’ prompts the poet to see the differences that are ‘like crimes woven into the weft’ and, in a way that William Blake would have recognised in his ‘A Poison Tree’, envy can be ‘buried long years in the black heart / of expressed admiration’ and ‘sunshine’ can be ‘really the withering of night’ which is ‘poured into soil where wheat grows’. And so it is—‘in and around and over and above’ because ‘all the bridges are down’. 

In April 2007 Jeremy Prynne wrote some notes for students about poems and translation:

Translation is for sure a noble art, making bridges for readers who want to cross the divide between their own culture and those cultures which are situated in other parts of the world; and yet a material bridge is passive and inert, without any life of its own, whereas a poetic translator must try to make a living construction with its own energy and powers of expression, to convey the active experience of a foreign original text.

As a translator of real distinction (Rilke’s Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus) Crucefix has for many years made these living constructions offering readers a gateway into new experiences whether it be through the world of Laozi’s Daodejing (Enitharmon Press, 2016) or through these new poems which offer echoes both of Hesiod’s Work and Days and the poems known as a vacanna which originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, was one of the deeply moving and memorable moments in his collection from Seren in 2017, The Lovely Disciplines. There the poem ‘Words and things’ presented an elderly individual who discovered ‘too late this absence of words’ which now ‘builds a prison’ and Crucefix recognised that ‘a man without language is no man’: as the world of objects becomes too difficult to dominate he can only have knowledge of a world which ‘turns in your loosening grip’. The echo of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ is surely no accidental one!

Translations are bridges, language is a bridge, and the distressing recognition of isolation within numbers is the dominant image in ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ from the first section of this new book:

fifteen kilometres of traffic wait before us

behind us the infinite tail

x

we are offered Google Map options

yet those trumpeted ten minute economies

x

are nothing till they can be proved

you make a choice you go your own way –

x

this has been better said before of course –

you cannot take the other way

x

and remain a unitary being on two paths

or perhaps sane – all roads crawl north

x

because multiple millions of cars crawl north

because all the bridges are down

Those ten minute trumpetings bring the world of Orwell’s 1984 to my mind as loud announcements of positive news seem to possess a tinny emptiness to the understanding of the isolated human who exists in a world of no bridges.

However, in contrast to this wave of uniformity one reads moments of ‘othering’ in the second section of this book as in ‘sharpening gusts along the valley floor’ a scrap of air was birthed

whirling inches above a littered drain

in a back street of some hilltop town

x

like Urbisaglia or some place that has seen

and has survived change of use

from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse

and no gully nor hill can stop it

In this moving world ‘great swathes of air’ gather strength to flex ‘all things to a scurrying to keep up / and the truth is some will and some will fail’.

In a poem titled ‘can you imagine’ (for my children) from the first section of Between a Drowning Man the power of language to translate the invisible onto the page is presented with an unerring eye focussed upon reality. In a world in which he no longer shares the companionship of others the poet is carried safely because although ‘you find the bridges between us fallen down’ and although ‘you mourn’ you can still ‘imagine’. That sense of continuity held in the imagination is far from the image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey, in 2015 whose death was recorded by Crucefix’s earlier book, Cargo of Limbs, from Hercules Editions in 2019. The boy’s family had fled from the war engulfing Syria in the hope of joining relatives in the safety of Canada and became ‘part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time’:

In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.

In this new book that ‘whim’ of a resting place for the hawk, those ‘whisperings’ prompt the bird, the poet, ‘to call it yet more steady perhaps’:

this whim—this wish—this risky flight

in the fleeting black wake of the carpenter bees

Mat Riches reviews ‘Between a Drowning Man’

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Many thanks to Mat Riches for this fulsome and acute reading of my recent collection from Salt Publishing. The review first appeared on The High Window – Jan 2024

The introduction to the first section of Between a Drowning Man states that it draws on two texts. The first is Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the second of which is described as

the type of poem known as a vacanna originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. using plain language, repetition and refrain they were written to praise the god, Siva, though also expressed a great deal of personal anger, puzzlement, even despair about the human condition […]

This helped put everything into context for what followed. One third of the way in I started to think of it as a man shouting at clouds in book form, of someone railing at things in the world that are beyond our control. And maybe it is all of this, but it also much more than this. I think it becomes a lesson in acceptance.

In a post on his own Blog, Crucefix describes these poems as starting to arrive after reading the vacanna poems in 2016, and how the poems began to accumulate after that while ‘staying in Keswick at the time and I vividly remember scribbling down brief pieces at all times of the day and night’ and of having been influenced by Brexit (the bridges are down indeed). However, he also describes in a follow up post that:

I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years …the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture.

And while the Brexit reading is there, these poems speak more to grounding a modern and disconnected world (despite plenty of references to devices for and modes of communication—we’ll come back to that shortly) in timeless themes like love and desire, parenting, ageing, joy in nature, false idols, and much more, and this is just in the first twenty or so pages.

Picking one of those themes at random, we can see how false idols are covered, but also how deftly he weaves in modern references to something that is both timeless, and of its time, and with that very human. In ‘the six pack on the side’ we are told:

the clock is a sinister and impassive god
for the ancients rumour was a kind of god
…

the god of WiFi when we curse its absence
and when did difference become a god

We have always been a narcissistic species that pays attention to gossip (‘rumour was a kind of god’), but while our gods have changed as the centuries have passed, we still curse our gods when they forsake us. Not a bad return for a 19-line poem in my opinion.

In order to achieve the ‘more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture’ we can see several pleas for more open lines of communication throughout the poems. Some are located in the specific and familial, as in ‘watch the child’ and its discussion of a child chattering away to herself in a coffee shop with her ‘bright picture book’ juxtaposed with ‘her mother at her cooling latte / at her macchiato / at her cooling skinny medium cappuccino // […] her mother’s ears wired casually // with two scarlet buds.

The child is broadcasting and communicating in a carefree way vs the mother’s more deliberate inward-looking approach, a shutting the world out for some respite. And while this could be a judgmental poem; it’s not. It feels like an invitation to consider both sides, both needs here. The refrain of ‘all the bridges are down’ lands particularly well here, both for the protagonists of the poem, but also for the reader.

However, while some pleas are located in the specific there are some more general ones to be found. In ‘he thought of this time’ one man recounts a litany of disappointments and emotions from his father. The poem draws from Hesiod and his idea of the fifth age where modern man was created by Zeus to be evil, selfish, weary, and burdened with sorrow. It’s a two-footed tackle on humanity from the whistle:

he thought of this time as a fifth age
that he’d be better off dead or not yet born
working all day he would fear the night
had heard of children born prematurely grey
and the fraying bond between fathers
and sons between mothers and daughters
between host and guest between different races

It continues without reprieve about a world where:

[…]the hopeless
are advanced and further advancement
lavished for no more than just chancing it
respect a word more spoken than heard
the educated full of corrosive cleverness
and compassion the greatest of virtues
an ebbing tide you see where it glints
on the horizon

At the time of writing, it’s easy to feel like these lines are as contemporary as it’s possible to be, and yet it’s arguable they are evergreen observations about humanity. However, I suspect that’s the point.

We’ve touched upon references to modern-day totems like WiFi, coffee types and headphones already, but this section is filled with them. Further examples include references to Google Maps and ‘five-star online reviews’ in ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ and ‘stoke a fire under your silk blouse’ respectively.

This all reaches its zenith in the final poem of the section, ‘this morning round noon’. The poem moves from personal notes about scattering ashes, a son’s birthday (and him being in huge debt at 21, one presumes from being at university) through to:

an American punk band form Nashville
posting abuse about a young Buddhist woman
refusing anaesthetic

The lines are punctuated by phrases like ‘likesharelike’ or ‘likeclicklike’ or ‘smileyfaceicon’. It’s the diaristic nature of the whole section writ large and transmitting thoughts to the page (albeit the printed page, not the Facebook page) as they occur. As an aside, this running together of words, coupled with the entire book’s distinct and clearly deliberate lack of punctuation (save a few dashes here and there) add to the observational nature of the poems, of thoughts being pulled from the ether. However, this is very much not to say that these poems aren’t considered and crafted—they very much are.

The final line of the poem and section is ‘I say the Pantone chart is one of my favourite things’, and while the poem that proceeds this line could be read as a darker version of the Sound of Music classic, less Raindrops on roses and more ‘I was hit by a car likeshare’, but I prefer to take it as a sign that the poem end on acceptance of nuance, variation and being able to communicate the same needs.

As the first section comes to an end there are two poems where the last line of one resurfaces as the start of the next, and it feels like a teaser for what follows in the second section, O. at the Edge of the Gorge.

This was previously published as a pamphlet by Guillemot Press in 2017 and is a crown of sonnets. After the hectic modernity of the first section, there is much to be said for the relative calm of following a traveller, Orpheus, on a journey through Italian countryside observing ‘Glossy fleet black clods of carpenter bees / swirl at the corner of the house / then sink onto spindly lavender stems / alight on blooms stooped // with the weight of insect lives’.

It’s a beautiful opening and a beautiful image that should perhaps be filmed and used as a fine example of what was briefly known as slow TV and shown on BBC4, but in the second poem he describes ‘astronomical time marked by light’ as the sun descends the gorge and church bells tolling, but:

yet come nightfall a different sense
these same sounds sound notes more chilling…

A very real sense of for whom the bell tolls, indeed. As the traveller wends their way round the area, taking notes and sketches of birds, a ‘flock of white doves’, that darkness returns in the form of a buzzard in the eighth sonnet, and gets deeper still in the ninth where he mentions:

like Urbisaglia or some place has seen
and survived change of use
from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse
and no gully nor hill can stop it

Urbisaglia is an ancient town in Mid-East Italy that became the site of an internment camp during the second world war, and that knowledge adds further weight to the stanza that begins sonnet ten:

The truth is some survive a while most fail
to conceive the scale of paperwork
to follow change of use from church to temple
next to slaughterhouse.

The cruelty of humanity to itself is mirrored in the “bloody festival / of the bird” in sonnet thirteen as it discusses a raptor above the gorge, and the final sonnet off this crown muses on the fragility of life:

All creatures die sooner blind to the hawk—
left clutching no more than this
as if the hammock he occupies each
and all night too as if strung out

[…]
not falling yet not ever at ease

‘not ever at ease’ could so easily be a final motif for the whole collection. There is a sense that the learnings of this collection are hard won, but there is a connection to the wider world to be had, and that we can find comfort in travelling through it. The final lines of ‘you are not in search of’ in the first section seem apt as a place to leave it:

you might say this aloud—by way of ritual—
there goes one who thought much of life

who found joy in return for a little gratitude.

Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence. Recent work has been in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings. A pamphlet called Collecting the Data is out via Red Squirrel Press. Twitter @matriches Blog: Wear The Fox Hat

A new podcast interview – plus a new review of ‘Between a Drowning Man’

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I am delighted to announce that Planet Poetry – the long-running, terrific poetry podcast run by Robin Houghton and Peter Kenny have released their new episode which includes an interview with me about my new Salt book. Do listen here: https://planetpoetry.buzzsprout.com/1414696/14024020-bridges-broken-with-martyn-crucefix

Stuart Henson has also written a fine review of Between a Drowning Man, which has recently been posted on the London Grip site. You can read the whole review here:

London Grip Poetry Review – Martyn Crucefix

New podcast discussion on Between a Drowning Man

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I’m very pleased to announce that Mark McGuinness’ excellent poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, which has recently featured poets such as Mona Arshi, Judy Brown, Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig, Mimi Khalvati, Clare Pollard, Tom Sastry, and Denise Saul, has recorded a discussion about my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man.

Mark’s method is to focus on one particular poem and between us we chose the poem ‘you are not in search of’, on page 57 of the new book, from the latter end of the ‘Works and Days’ sequence. You can listen to the podcast here. It’s about 40 minutes in length and includes a reading of the poem at the beginning and end. There is also a helpful transcription of our discussion.

Here is the poem text – though without the indents which are hard to reproduce here:

‘you are not in search of’

‘There has to be / A sort of killing’ – Tom Rawling

you are not in search of a gilded meadow

though here’s a place you might hope to find it

the locals point you to Silver Bay

x

to a curving shingled beach where once

I crouched as if breathless as if I’d followed

a trail of scuffs and disappointments

x

and the wind swept in as it usually does

and the lake water brimmed and I knew the thrill

of its mongrel plenitude as colours

x

of thousands of pebbles like bright cobblestones

slid uneasily beneath my feet—

imagine it’s here I want you to leave me

x

these millions of us aspiring to the condition

of ubiquitous dust on the fiery water

one moment—then dust in the water the next

x

then there’s barely a handful of dust

compounding with the brightness of water

then near-as-dammit gone—

x

you might say this aloud—by way of ritual—

there goes one who thought much of life

who found joy in return for a little gratitude

x

before its frugal bowls of iron and bronze

set out—then vanished—then however you  try

to look me up—whatever device you click

x

or tap or swipe—I’m neither here nor there

though you might imagine one particle

in some stiff hybrid blade of grass

x

or some vigorous weed arched towards the sun

though here is as good a place as any

you look for me in vain—the bridges down—

Influences on ‘Between a Drowning Man’ #2

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Last week, with the imminent arrival of my new book of poems, Between a Drowning Man, I decided it would be useful – for those who would like to know – if I re-blogged a piece I wrote and posted early in 2019 about one of the key sources and inspirations of the new book’s main sequence of poems called ‘Works and Days’. The focus then was on my reading of AK Ramanujan’s collection of vacana poems. But later in the process of completing the full sequence, it was further formed (or reformed or deformed) by rather different pressures derived from a second literary antecedent, the reading of which was itself influenced by the febrile and divided atmosphere surrounding political events in the UK between 2016 and 2019. I mean, of course, Brexit.

At the time, I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years (partly with the greater clarity with which the Brexit heist can be now seen to have been foisted on the country), the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture. It was Hesiod’s pre-Homeric poem, Works and Days, that suddenly felt oddly familiar: in it he is not harking back to an already lost era, nor to past heroic (in our case imperial) events. Instead, Hesiod talks about his own, contemporary workaday world, offering advice to his brother because the pair of them seem to be in some sort of a dispute with each other (a squabble over limited resources – that sounded familiar).

So my developing sequence took over from Hesiod the idea of familial disputes, the importance of the persistence of Hope (in the Pandora’s jar story), the idea that we need to understand that we are living in an Age of Iron (not idealised Gold). Poetry can never be summarised by its own conclusions but the poems seemed to me to be arguing the need to work hard – to have patience – not to buy into fairy tales of a recoverable golden age that probably never existed anyway. If all this sounds interesting, do click on the blog title below to read the whole of my original post. After a bit of New Year 2019 preamble, the discussion of Hesiod begins at paragraph 3.

My first public reading of these poems from my new book will be on the evening of Tuesday 24th October at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I’ll be reading alongside 2 other Salt poets:  Elisabeth Sennitt-Clough – ‘My Name is Abilene’ (Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize); and Becky Varley-Winter – ‘Dangerous Enough’ (‘daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world’).

Hesiod Harangues His Lazy Brother

Influences on ‘Between a Drowning Man’ #1

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With the arrival of my new book of poems, Between a Drowning Man, imminent, I thought it would be useful to re-blog a piece I wrote and posted early in 2019 about one of the key sources and inspirations of the new book’s main sequence of poems called ‘Works and Days’. It was my fortuitous reading of AK Ramanujan’s collection of vacana poems, early in 2016 (all explained below), that set me off experimenting with a similar clipped, plain, rapid, fluid style with its (refrain like) repetitions. I was staying in Keswick at the time and I vividly remember scribbling down brief pieces at all times of the day and night. Outside, and interfering with the various walking expeditions we had planned, the great storm of the winter of 2015/6 (googling it now, it was Storm Desmond) had taken out many of the ancient bridges in the Cumbrian countryside. Inevitably, this fact found its way into the poems and provided the refrain I used in many of them.

It has been a long haul between that period and the poems’ eventual appearance in this new collection and the whole sequence was further formed (or reformed or deformed) by pressures of a second literary antecedent (I’ll blog about that next week) and by the divisive political events in the UK between 2016 and 2019. Click on the blog title below to read the whole of the original post. My first public reading from the new book will be on the evening of Tuesday 24th October at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I’ll be reading alongside 2 other Salt poets:  Elisabeth Sennitt-Clough – ‘My Name is Abilene’ (Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize); and Becky Varley-Winter – ‘Dangerous Enough’ (‘daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world’).

This Thing Called Bhakti: Vacanas and Ted Hughes