Durs Grünbein Reading at The Goethe-Institute, London

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, Classical poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, ekphrastic poetry, German poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, political poetry, translation, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Please Note: this blog and website are now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive held at The British Museum. Many thanks to them.

The highlight of last week was attending Durs Grünbein’s reading at The Goethe- Institute, where he was in discussion with his English translator, Karen Leeder. At the beginning of the evening, Grünbein joked that he’d not been in the UK for a few years and this was the first time he’d had to produce his passport (the blessings of Brexit). Interestingly, in the light of last weekend’s German election results, Grünbein has often been described as a poet of the reunified Germany, having been born in Dresden and now living with his family in eastern Berlin. Grünbein’s poetry is witty, wry, perceptive, and influenced by a broad range of literary texts and often presents the disillusionment of having grown up in East Germany and explores Germany’s identity in post-Cold War Europe. He has been very vocal in recent years on the issues of immigration and the defence of Ukraine. Helen Vendler commented on the ‘sardonic humour, the savagery, the violent candor—all expressed in lines of cool formal elegance’ and Philip Ottermann, in The Independent, noted ‘Grünbein loves to jump from one register to another—one moment he is the street poet of Berlin, the next … all marble and ancient philosophy’.

Grünbein’s earlier poems were translated into English by Michael Hofmann and published in Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems (Faber, 2005). Karen Leeder has now published Psyche Running, a selection of more recent poems from 2005–2022 (Seagull Books). During the evening, Grünbein commented on the process of those earlier translations as ‘strange’ and the results (as is Hofmann’s wont) as being very free, very sparky, and Leeder suggested there was a particular excitement in the ‘to and fro’ between author and translator to be found in them. She then suggested her approach has been rather different, perhaps a more dutiful one, still needing to make the poems ‘live’ in the target language, but also demanding a fidelity, to capture the original’s form and architecture as closely as possible. The work read during the evening suggests that her translations triumphantly achieve these goals.

Leeder said that his work can have a ‘marble’-like quality, a firm (unbending?) Classicism, and also that he has himself been labelled a ‘poeta doctus’, given the learned, wide-ranging references he incorporates. Grünbein rather demurred at these descriptions and (an idea he repeated a couple of times in slightly different forms) any interesting poem must be the result of two steps, the first poetic, the second, a more critical, a process of reflection (a later formulation suggested the two steps were ‘perceptual’ and ‘conceptual’). These two phases result in the finished poem as ‘a form of knowledge’; Grünbein pointed out that philosophy arose out of poetry in Classical times (not the other way round). The first poem he read, ‘Childhood in the Diorama’, does have a ‘marble’-like quality to it: longish, unrhymed lines in a solid verse paragraph and the child’s preference for the posed scenes of a museum’s diorama, their ‘inert’ quality. But on one occasion, the boy sensed some movement, a ‘draught, perhaps, had blown through the displays’, perhaps suggestive of the child’s development into a more unstable, fluid view of the world.

Other poems read that evening included ‘Nee Wachtel’, ‘Exaltations in Sleep’, and ‘Inspector Kobold’ which is a ‘Martian’ sort of piece describing seahorses, in ‘their whalebone corsets, like ‘tiny ocean Lipizzaners’ (here’s an alternative translation by Michael Eskin). If we are to take Grünbein’s poems as ‘forms of knowledge’ then they certainly range widely through the natural sciences, language, science more generally, astronomy, history and politics. He felt what binds all this together is the one individual life, the single life perspective, poetry as a sort of anthropological study, at which Leeder suggested there was a ‘fragility’ to much of his work, the vulnerability of the single life as much as all life (ecologically?). The poet was happy to agree to this, suggesting ‘marble’ was not at all the right term for his poetry, that there was always something ‘flowing’ about it, multiple angles and perspectives. He once claimed not to be a ‘German’ poet, but simply someone who wrote in the German language. This evening he stood by that statement: his own identity is wrapped up in language use, the mother’s language, used daily for years, and is not a function of birthplace alone (remember Grünbein grew up in East Germany and now lives in the unified Germany).

But his birthplace has been undoubtedly important in Porcelain (Seagull, 2020), the long sequence of poems (written slowly, we learned, on the February anniversaries of the Allies’ bombing of his hometown, Dresden). I reviewed this book here, when it was published). Grünbein read 10 poems from this sequence (some poems were read only in German with the English translation projected above), other poems read in both languages. Porcelain is an elegy the poet suggested, a Classical form, longing for what is lost. Poem #7 is one of the most remarkable, another museum visit by the young poet, who’d stare at a cherry stone from the 16th century, carved with 185 tiny heads. The poem comes to regard the curious object as an ‘emblem of the future’ of Dresden, presenting as it seemed to, faces, ‘eyes wide with terror, on every tiny screaming face, / inferno on a needle tip’.

The poet suggested the whole sequence of poems is also a kind of ‘sound system’ containing echoes or samples of other poets’ work, including Paul Celan, with Grünbein’s title (Porce-lain) being a pun on the earlier poet’s name. Leeder added that it should not be read in a narrowly nationalistic fashion, that a lot more (bombed) cities than just Dresden were alluded to by the poem (Coventry, Warsaw, Odessa, Guernica). She asked Grünbein what was it that kept drawing him back to Dresden as a subject matter for poems. He thought it had something to do with the moment when he realised that his own childhood was ‘historical’, in the sense of being intimately connected to major historical events. He recalls seeing truckloads of Russian soldiers passing where he grew up, heading to the nearby Russian military barracks. This produced a sense in the young boy that much in (his) life had been determined before his arrival on the scene. In this sense, his hometown acquired a ‘mythic’ quality.

KL: You mean it was a ‘world place’?

DG: Yes – I realised it was a reference point, worldwide, its splendour and its ruins. From the city of Dresden one can draw out a lot of history, a seed point, or like a jigsaw, that can be slowly pieced together.

Perhaps half a dozen more poems were presented from more recent collections. ‘Flea Market’ is a peerless poem about German history, starting from the bric-a-brac found in such markets – the spoons, brooches, bird cages, tables – and wondering ‘what / do they say, what do they hide’? Quiet allusions to ‘uniforms and daggers of honour’, seque into the next, even more troubling, question: ‘How can one’s thoughts not go astray / faced with the piles of glasses, / and old leather suitcases?’ The poem ‘Lumière’ also alludes to the Holocaust and starts out from descriptions of the Lumière brothers’ 1896 film of a train pulling into a station. The first film-goers were frightened at the image of the train’s approach, ‘but not yet the horror / at all the implacable trains / that have criss-crossed the century, / the endless rows of sealed trucks.’

Asked where his poetry might be heading, Grünbein surprisingly suggested that he felt a more prose-like quality entering his work – not so Classical then! A soberness in some ways – but with flashes of magic, magic spells even. His earlier suggestion that the good poem is a 2-step process – perceptual, conceptual – seems to be still important, though in the final result (I’m guessing Grünbein would agree with this) the two stages must be simultaneously present in the reader’s experience.

I have to say, one of the great pleasures of the evening was the way in which both participants took the poetry seriously and gave it a good outing. This may sound odd for a poetry reading, but often these days, I find too many readings/launches contain too little poetry and rather too much gossiping, drinking and networking (all of which can be excluding for those not in the swim). Can I make a plea for more reading at readings, a little less career-building? Of course, at The Goethe-Institute we were listening to two writers at the very top of their game and what they are creating – in German and in English – is vital, lasting stuff. But, if we are publishing poetry, we should not be shy of reading it (remember, not everyone attending will be able to afford to buy the book and take it home).

Remembering Geoffrey Grigson

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, political poetry, Romantic poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve recently seen announced a celebration of the work of Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985), scheduled to take place at 7.30pm, on Tuesday March 4th at West Greenwich Library. The event is called ‘In His Own Voice: Geoffrey’s Grigson’s Poetry’ and is being organised by John Greening with contributions from Grigson’s daughter, Caroline, his grandson, Joe Banks, and poets Graham High and Blake Morrison (and archive recordings of the poet himself). The event is free to attend (donations welcome), plus refreshments and books on sale. Texts will be projected on screen. As the event blurb reminds us, Grigson lived and worked through amazing times, culturally and politically, and was a prolific poet, writer, critic and editor. At the centre of English intellectual life, he knew the poetry grandees of his days and greatly admired those of the past. When he was only 27, he founded the bi-monthly journal ‘New Verse’, thus becoming hugely influential in the poetry world.  I reviewed John Greening’s selection of Grigson’s work when it came out in 2017, and this seems an opportune moment to re-post it here and on my new Substack. 

Surely we all have one or two Faber anthologies edited by Geoffrey Grigson on our shelves? Love Poems, Popular Verse, Reflective Verse, Nonsense Verse, Poems and Places, Epigrams and Epitaphs . . . As a critic he often wielded a savage power through his magazine New Verse. And as a big beast on the literary scene of the early 1980s, Hermione Lee interviewed him on Channel 4. But since his death in 1985, he’s better known merely as the husband of Jane Grigson, the celebrated cookery writer. His own poetry has been neglected which made John Greening’s 2017 Selected Poems from Greenwich Exchange a welcome opportunity to re-consider it. I think Grigson’s contrasting themes were established early on. The influence of two great poets (not Eliot, not Yeats) is clear from the start and it may be that the limits of Grigson’s poetic achievement and the absence of much development in his style, are because he never chose one path or fully escaped either.

The influence of Auden was very clear in Grigson’s first collection, Several Observations (1939). ‘Meeting by the Gjulika Meadow’ presents an enigmatic narrative in a “frontier” landscape; a meeting between two men whose conversation is in large part concerned with “the thunder / about Europe”. There are sketched fragments of personal dependencies and guilts but the whole reads as a slice of narrative that has been carefully shorn of its explicatory elements. A poem from 1946 shows Grigson using similar methods but on matters much closer to home; ‘In a Dark Passage’ draws material from the deaths of two of Grigson’s brothers in WW1 and the early death of his first wife, Frances. The situations are still relatively distanced by being told in the third person and the timings of the incidents are compressed to form a litany of heartfelt if rhetorical griefs: “O floes of ice, you float downstream / But do not disappear”.

There is certainly a very dark river running through Grigson’s work. ‘Two A.M.’, from the 1970s, records a wakefulness at night filled – as so often – by nothing but questions: “all emptiness, all gravity, / Ultimacy, nothingness”. He captures vividly the way this kind of mood, at such an hour, insists on expanding exponentially, racing to fill the world’s “Sierras, monadnocks, lakes, prairies, taiga, ice”. On this occasion, there is the possibility of an erotic reply: “At least now, with our bodies close, / Be comforted”. But even that response is absent from ‘Again Discard the Night’ from the 1980 collection, History of Him. Written as a first person narrative this time, the poem pulls no punches in its flinty and unforgiving portrait of old age waking:

… you call, the kettle gathers

And talks, and Are you all right? comes your

Usual cry, and my habit insists, without sound, Reply,

Be bright, wash, shave, dress, and this once,

Again discard the night.

Of course, Grigson’s sense of an ungoverned and likely meaningless universe matched with his frequent backward glances also calls to mind Hardy’s work. One of Grigson’s earliest poems, ‘The Children’, has an 11-line stanza of complex rhyming that Hardy would have been proud of. The children are portrayed as playing in a natural environment and in a state of temporal innocence: “They looked for no clocks, noticed no hours”. But ending each stanza, the triple rhyme words with “hours” are (ambiguously) “sours” and “flowers”. Between the third and fourth stanza, there is the kind leap in time often found in folk song (and Hardy). We have instantaneously passed many years: “The rooms were pulled down, but they always abide / In the minds of the children born in them”. These are the best lines in the poem with the much cooler closing lines rather falling flat:

They see the clocks and notice the hour

And aware that restriction of love turns sour,

They feel the cold wind and consider the flower.

It is certainly Hardy that Grigson is thinking of in ‘In View of the Fleet’. The Fleet is the lagoon behind Chesil Beach in Dorset and the poem borrows phrases from Hardy, empathetically suggesting that each poet’s vision has the same sequential locus: “Things not as firstly well, a sparkling day, and / tolling of a bell”.

John Greening suggests in his very helpful Introduction that Grigson is also capable of an “extraordinary lyricism” and these are moments when he captures this “sparkling” quality of the natural world. In ‘A New Tree’, helped by the holding up of a child to a window, the narrator sees again with a newly cleansed perception, “a sun / being fiercely / let loose again”. Delight in the natural world recurs in a key poem, ‘Note on Grunewald’. In it, Grigson also expresses the scepticism about literary achievements which must have driven much of his own, often acerbic, critical comments on the work of others. In a man who devoted a lifetime to literary endeavours, it’s hard to take wholly seriously the poem’s assertion that he’d rather live to sniff the “scent of the flowers of lime” than to create lasting “poems”. But the scent is praised in contrast to the art of “Grunewald’s spotted green-rotted Christ”. Grigson sides with (“I join”) Cowper in deciding that death holds no attraction and that he too would choose to “leave this world never”. The perceived dichotomy between a vivid inhabiting of the world of the senses and the ‘rotten’ achievement of artists is by no means Grigson’s final comment on these issues, but the poem certainly expresses unresolved tensions.

As Greening reminds us, Grigson as a critic was a feared and fearsome creature, liable to “dismissiveness and intolerance of shoddy work”. Perhaps, in his own mind, he never quite resolved his assessment of his own poems. A lovely translation from Tu Fu was perhaps chosen because it laments lack of achievement, or at least of recognition: “Writing gives me no name”.* More vigorously, ‘Lecture Note: Elizabethan period’ is an hilarious and outrageous account of a poet’s final work. While the ink was still wet on the page, he dropped dead. The poem fell to the floor only for the maid to drop it in “the jakes”. The final lines laugh cynically, sarcastically, as if this illustrates the fate of most artistic endeavours: “Now irretrievably beshitten, it was, dear sirs, / The one immortal poem he had written”. Yet this is delicate stuff compared to Grigson taking aim with both barrels in ‘Perhaps So’. The premise is that too much is being written:

Too much is told. Banish polymath Steiners

And seventy-seven other British Shiners,

Naturalists, archaeologists, publishers

Of publications in parts,

Norman Mailer

And all long-winded farts . . .

It’s hard to reconcile this voice with that of ‘A New Tree’. Interestingly, Grigson’s address to an ancestor whose name was ‘Nazareth Pitcher’ is critical on the surface, disparaging of Nazareth’s “pride”, suggesting his “lips were too thin”, that he might “be pleased” if he was to witness the parlous state of the world now (1960s). But it’s also difficult to dismiss the feeling that Grigson chose to address Nazareth because he sensed a kinship with this judgemental, sceptical and meanly satirical man.

Having said that, Grigson did admire, if very judiciously. Greening draws attention to an Eliotesque belief in tradition, that the best poems are made by “members of a long narrow community through time”. The word “narrow” here indicates Grigson felt that much of what was truly best was not appreciated by many. In one word perhaps, we see here his motivation to be harsh with what he felt not good enough and his hard work in anthologising what was. There are two tribute poems in Greening’s selection which show Grigson at his complimenting best. ‘A Painter of Our Day’ is about Ben Nicholson and has the feel of a Coleridgean conversation poem. Its tone is confiding, admiring, ranging from observations about playing with children, shared days out, discussions of Nicholson’s work, ageing and the nature of art. Nicholson seems to teach an appreciation of “what is” and an avoidance of nostalgia. But at the same time, he recognises the value of the “reiterated wisdom of perceiving”. That both poet and artist set the bar of achievement very high indeed is suggested by Grigson’s admission that, of their chosen role models, “most have been / Long dead”. I find it hard to pin down a more precisely articulated aesthetic, but these lines are revealing of any artist’s relation to his/her elders:

Suddenly when young or in our first ability

We find them, slowly we find the reasons

For our love, finding ourselves, and what we lack

As well or need the most

Finally, ‘To Wystan Auden’ records the moment Grigson learned of Auden’s death in the “English September” of 1973. His admiration for the younger poet is fulsome. With the appearance of his early work, Auden became “living’s healer, loving’s / Magician”. From the other end of the temporal telescope, we can now see what the young Grigson gleaned from Auden’s poetry:

You were our fixture, our rhythm,

Speaker, bestower, of love for us all

And forgiving, not condemning, extending

To all who would read or would hear

Your endowment of words.

For all Auden’s own protesting about poetry making nothing happen, for Grigson, “time, after you, by you / Is different by your defiance”. One might ungratefully gripe that these are rather vague compliments from one poet to another. But Greening quotes Grigson suggesting that Auden’s achievement was in destroying “a too familiar, too settled monotony in manner and subject”. This is undeniable and this selection shows Grigson following Auden’s lead, yet at the same time, through his life, also being drawn back to a different, more traditional poetic style in the model of Hardy. Here, for example, in his last years, he recalls his childhood in Cornwall:

Staring down from that broken, one-arched bridge,

In that vale of water-mint, saint, lead-mine and midge,

I was amazed by that fat black-and-white water bird

Hunting under the current, not at all disturbed.

How could I tell that what I saw then and there

Would live for me still in my eightieth year?

*As a labouring translator myself, I have long remembered Grigson’s brilliant put-down in his Introduction to the Faber Book of Love Poems (1973). Explaining why he has not included any translations at all, he declares that their “unmeasured, thin-rolled short crust” would prove detrimental to the health of the nation’s poetic taste. Times have changed, thank goodness.

Remembering Blue Nose Poetry events in London

martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary Caribbean poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, poetry workshops, political poetry, post-colonial writing, teaching, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I recently attended the launch of Philip Gross’ new collection, The Shores of Vaikus (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) at the Estonian Embassy (the poems and prose pieces in the book refer to Gross’ father’s Estonian heritage and the poet’s visits to that country). I’ve followed his poetry since Faber published The Ice Factory in 1984. Neither of us could recall when we’d last met up but, after the event, I remembered that Philip was one of the first poets to read at the series of poetry readings (and associated workshops) I helped curate in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the Blue Nose Poetry series in London. I introduced him on the occasion (I still have the notes I made for the event in a Notebook for Spring 1989). I checked out the precise date in The Blue Nose Poetry Anthology (1993) which has sat on my shelves for many years now. The Blue Nose Poets (for personnel see below) invited all those who had read in the series to submit work and it strikes me now that it would be a shame if a record of our endeavours over a number of years was lost to sight completely. So, I’m posting here the Introduction to the Anthology and the full list of readers who appeared (often being paid nothing or a mere pittance) between 1989 and 1993. Interesting? I think so – given we hosted the likes of Dannie Abse, Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, Simon Armitage, James Berry, Robert Creeley, Fred D’Aguiar, Michael Donaghy, Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Horowitz, Jackie Kay, Adrian Mitchell, Peter Porter, Peter Reading, Michèle Roberts, Ken Smith, and many more.

Introduction to The Blue Nose Poetry Anthology

This anthology celebrates four years of Blue Nose Poetry in London. Its beginnings can be traced back to 1988, when Sue Hubbard advertised for members to join a small poetry workshop at her house in Highbury. Amongst others who began meeting regularly were the four founder members of the Blue Nose: Sue, Martyn Crucefix, Mick Kinshott and Denis Timm. At that time, poetry readings in London seemed to be in the doldrums. Uninviting rooms and draughty halls with chairs in impersonal ranks were often depressingly matched by poor organisation. The Blue Nose Poetry activities were set up with the express intention of providing workshops and readings in a friendly, accessible and organised atmosphere for new voices, up and coming writers and the already established. We were convinced that a cabaret setting of tables, candles and a drink with other enthusiasts could make poetry enjoyable. It was only with the discovery of The Blue Nose Cafe in Mountgrove Road, close to Highbury Stadium, that we found a name for the project and the real success of the Blue Nose began.

Our first poets came to the Cafe and read out of the goodness of their hearts. We thank them all once again. The first event with Michèle Roberts was packed and exceeded our wildest expectations. Within the course of one evening we had proved that exciting contemporary poetry could be presented really successfully. Soon, in response to Blue Nose’s track record of commitment and quality, GLA (later LAB) and Islington Borough agreed to support the project. Since then, there have been various changes. Mick Kinshott felt unable to continue as an organiser in 1990 and his commitment and humour was a great loss. His place was taken for two years by Bruce Barnes, whose knowledge of the poetry and arts funding world in London proved invaluable to the development of the project. More recently, Mimi Khalvati and Mario Petrucci have joined the three original members. In the middle of the Spring 1991 season, the Cafe where we held the events went into liquidation and a reading by Tom Pickard and Rosemary Norman sadly had to be called off. Regular events did not begin again until May 1991, when we moved into the more accessible, roomy and centrally located Market Tavern in Islington. Despite the many advantages of this new venue, there are a few who still regret the passing of the old Café which, though tiny, disorganised and terminally broke, did have a superb atmosphere for poetry.

In an appendix to this anthology, we list all the readers who have appeared at the venue/s – a genuinely comprehensive survey of poetry in recent years. This, of course, does not include the many poets who have had the opportunity to read from the floor at Blue Nose events. More importantly, this book contains no record of the hundreds and hundreds of people who have enjoyed and supported Blue Nose Poetry. This book is dedicated to them.

Martyn Crucefix / Sue Hubbard / Mimi Khalvati / Mario Petrucci / Denis Timm

Full List of Main/Support Readers for Blue Nose Poetry Seasons 1989 – 1993

March – July 1989

Michèle Roberts read with Martyn Crucefix; Philip Gross read with Sue Hubbard; Jeremy Silver read with Mick Kinshott; Jo Shapcott read with Denis Timm; Leo Aylen read with Gerda Mayer; Alison Fell read with Hume Cronyn; The Blue Nose Poets; Carole Satyamurti read with Barbara Zanditon; Michael Donaghy read with Rupert Slade; Adam Thorpe read with Al Celestine.

Philip Gross

September – December 1989

Ken Smith read with Mimi Khalvati; Anna Adams and Julian May; Gerda Mayer read with Chris Powici; The Blue Nose Poets; The Performing Oscars; Maura Dooley read with Sara Boyes; Fred D’Aguiar read with Matt Caley; Matthew Sweeney read with Hilary Davies.

January – April 1990

Fleur Adcock read with John Harvey; Dannie Abse read with Myra Schneider; Elaine Randell read with Frances Presley; Hugo Williams read with Keith Spencer; Pitika Ntuli read with Bruce Barnes; John Cotton read with Bridget Bard; Michele Roberts read with Peter Daniels.

Robert Creeley

May – July 1990

The Blue Nose Poets; Sarah Maguire read with Vicki Feaver; Jeni Couzyn read with W N Herbert; James Berry read with Susan McGarry; Simon Armitage read with Chris Gutkind; E A Markham read with Mimi Khalvati; Brian Patten.

September – December 1990

In the Gold of Flesh anthology with Valerie Sinason, Dinah Livingstone, Pascal Petit, Jenny Vuglar; George Szirtes read with Gabriel Chanan; Kit Wright read with Candice Lange; The Blue Nose Poets; Michael Horovitz read with Raggy Farmer; Patience Agbabi and Judi Benson; Jenako Arts Writers; Carol Ann Duffy read with Steve Griffiths.

January – March 1991

Judith Kazantzis read with Mario Petrucci; Robert Creeley read with Mick Kinshott; Jackie Kay read with the Speech Painters; Peter Forbes and Eva Salzman; [Blue Nose Cafe in Highbury suddenly closes]; Lemn Sissay read with Adam Acidophilus.

May – July 1991

Peter Porter read with Elizabeth Garrett; The Blue Nose Poets; Carole Satyamurti read with Leon Cych; Peter Scupham read with Lucien Jenkins; Leo Aylen read with Rosemary Norman.

October – December 1991

Sylvia Kantaris read with Andrew Jordan; Gillian Allnutt read with Helen Kidd; Alan Jenkins read with Eric Heretic; Sean Street and Hubert Moore; Lee Harwood and Richard Cadell; Xmas Party – Tony Maude, Speech Painters and music from Dean Carter.

January – April 1992

Adrian Mitchell; David Constantine read with Tim Gallagher; David Morley with Martyn Crucefix; Sue Stewart read with Bruce Barnes; Glyn Maxwell read with Sue Hubbard; Peter Abbs read with Nicky Rice.

Adrian Mitchell

May – July 1992

Jo Shapcott read with Mick Kinshott; Bobbie Louise Hawkins read with Robert Sheppard; Birdyak – Bob Cobbing and Hugh Metcalfe; Colin Rowbotham read with Richard Tyrrell; Ken Smith read with Eric Heretic.

October – December 1992

Connie Bensley and Felicity Napier; The Poetry Show at Rebecca Hossack Gallery; Donald Atkinson read with Jane Duran; Ruth Fainlight read with Moniza Alvi.

January – April 1993

Peter Reading read with Briar Wood; Ruth Valentine; Myra Schneider read with Mario Petrucci; Carol Rumens read with Daphne Rock.

‘Dressel’s Garden’ – a new translation from the German

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation, writing , , , , ,

My new translation of a long(ish) Jürgen Becker poem (the first ever into English) has just been posted on the US site, Asymptote. Do click the link above and have a look at it. You can also hear an audio recording of the opening passages of the poem read in German (thank you, old friend, Tim Turner). Becker’s work is really very unusual – and hardly known at all in translation. I have been working on a particular collection of his poems, published originally in 1993 – Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium. Asymptote is a marvellous site with a whole range of creative work, so once you are there, stay and have a look around.

RIP Michael Longley

martyn crucefix brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, Great War poetry, Irish poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, political poetry, post-colonial writing, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical wobbling often made him have to take his seat again; but the humour and mischievous twinkle were as powerful as ever. Over the years, I have to admit it took me a while to really come to appreciate his work; I think I did not really ‘get’ the force of his brevity, his precision. If you have not seen it yet, do watch the brilliant, moving, inspiring BBC programme about him, his life and work here. I’m posting below my review of his 2014 collection, The Stairwell (the review originally published in Poetry London) and I hope it manages to say something useful to both new and older readers of this wonderful poet. Here he is reading ‘Remembering Carrigskeewaun’ on The Poetry Archive.

Keeper, custodian, traditionalist whose work is stringent, formalist, always elegant: critical judgments on Michael Longley’s work fence him round too closely, running the risk of misleading, even discouraging, new readers. It’s true, as a member of Philip Hobsbaum’s Group in Belfast in the 1960s, Longley’s poems were criticized for their elegance of form, rhetorical grace and verbal eloquence, though he found something of a kindred spirit in Derek Mahon. Longley wrote poems that were “polished, metrical and rhymed; oblique rather than head-on; imagistic and symbolic rather than rawly factual; rhetorical rather than documentary” (The Honest Ulsterman, November, 1976). But Seamus Heaney’s different aesthetic was Hobsbaum’s star turn and quickly became a national, then international preference. Attitudes solidified around Longley although (perhaps in the cause of self-definition) this was not something he resisted, casting himself and Mahon in the 1973 poem ‘Letters’ as “poetic conservatives”.

‘Epithalamium’, the poem that since 1969 has opened Longley’s selections and collecteds reinforces the caricature and in ‘Emily Dickinson’ he sees the need to dress “with care for the act of poetry”. But Longley’s long standing admiration of Edward Thomas was not for nothing and he shared a desire to dismiss Swinburnian “musical jargon that [. . . ] is not and never could be speech” so that in The Echo Gate (1979) he is experimenting, on the one hand with the plainly Frostian ‘Mayo Monologues’, and on the other with short, imagistic pieces in which the authorial voice seems to have taken a vow of non-intervention. ‘Thaw’ reads, in its entirety:

Snow curls into the coalhouse, flecks the coal.

We burn the snow as well in bad weather

As though to spring-clean that darkening hole.

The thaw’s a blackbird with one white feather.

This is a mode that Longley has continued to explore in accordance with another (surprisingly) early statement of poetic intent. The poet’s duty is to “celebrate life in all its aspects, to commemorate normal human activities. Art is itself a normal human activity. The more normal it appears in the eyes of the artist and his audience, the more potent a force it becomes” (Longley, ed. Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, 1971).

Subsequent collections have become concerned to list, to name, as it were ‘merely’ to record experience for its own sake, often in vivid short poems which run the risk of seeming inconsequence, though Longley has never lost his unerring eye and ear for the poetic line. Nor has he ever seriously questioned the adequacy of language (within conventional bounds) to represent experience. It’s in these ways that his work is conservative but his poems’ intention to encompass and witness is far more radical. To witness – whether it is the song of a wren near Longley’s beloved Carrigskeewaun, a Belfast bombing, or the camp at Terezin – is to acknowledge that we are bound together by what happens. From Gorse Fires (1991) to The Weather in Japan (2000) Longley comes to sound like Eliot’s Tereisias who, as the pages turn, has “seen and foresuffered all”. The beauty of nature, the horrors of mankind, birth and death, the present and the distant past are all absorbed into his steady gaze, a steady voice, intent on an anatomy of connection.

One such connection is the way Longley has been re-visiting the Iliad and Odyssey for years now, producing vivid, contemporary accounts of key scenes. Priam’s visit to Achilles tent in Book 24 of the Iliad famously became Longley’s poem ‘Ceasefire’, appearing in The Irish Times in 1994 when the IRA were considering a ceasefire themselves. The poem forges links and connections between enemies and across millennia. As ‘All of these people’ puts it, “the opposite of war / Is not so much peace as civilization” and civilization needs to be founded on a right relationship with even the smallest of things. Among many poems that articulate an ars poetica, ‘The Waterfall’ envisages the best place to read his own collected works as “this half-hearted waterfall / That allows each pebbly basin its separate say”. It is such civilized allowance, rather than the much-vaunted preservation of a tradition, that is the mark of Longley’s aesthetic, moral and political outlook.

His new collection, The Stairwell, is much obsessed with death though its inevitable reality has already been embraced by the poet’s allowance. An Exploded View (1973) already contained ‘Three Posthumous Pieces’ and twenty years later, ‘Detour’ mapped out his own funeral procession. Here, Longley has been “thinking about the music for my funeral” (‘The Stairwell’) and much of the book has the feeling of an ageing figure readying to depart. Longley himself refers to his “unassuming nunc dimittis” (‘Birth-Bed’) and the only ceremonial he anticipates is to be provided by robins, wrens, blackbirds: “I’ll leave the window open for my soul-birds” (‘Deathbed’). The counterweight to civilized allowance, even in the approach of death, is modesty and humility. If gifts are to be handed on to the future then they ought to include a little poem about a wren: “Its cotton-wool soul, / Wire skeleton [. . . ] / Its tumultuous / Aria in C” (‘Another Wren’).

Such unassuming gifts to future generations are balanced, in the civilized society Longley seeks out, by the commemoration of the past. This is something his poems continue to do with his re-imagining of his father’s experiences in the Great War and this new collection contains more of these poems; his father at ‘High Wood’ among “unburied dead”, befriending the future Hollywood star, Ronald Colman, or taking an ironic “breather before Passchendaele” (‘Second Lieutenant Tooke’). Whether looking forwards or backwards, the true gift lies in the specific, not the generalized. ‘Insomnia’ recalls Helen Thomas calming and consoling the mad Ivor Gurney, by guiding his “lonely finger down the lanes” of her husband’s map of Gloucestershire. Longley looks for this too. Here is the whole of ‘Wild Raspberries’:

Following the ponies’ hoof-prints

And your own muddy track, I find

Sweet pink nipples, wild raspberries,

A surprise among the brambles.

Having translated a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, Longley goes on to wonder what his “understated” neighbours around Carrigskeewaun would make of such “grandiloquence” (‘After Mikhail Lermontov’). It’s in the avoidance of a hyper-inflated language and tone that Longley’s re-makings of Homer are so good. The new book contains a fair sampling of these too, many of them in the second half which forms an extended elegy, commemorating Longley’s twin brother, Peter. The Homeric paralleling works less well in this context, though the unrhymed double sonnet, ‘The Apparition’, in which the ghost of Patroclus pleads to be buried by Achilles, addressing him as his “dear brother” is powerful. But I’m reminded of Heaney’s Station Island (1984) in which he revised and regretted his earlier use of “the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio” in writing a poem about the murder of Colum McCartney in Field Work (1979). Longley’s Homeric material casts such a strong shadow and the vital life of Peter is insufficiently conveyed, except in a few recollections of their shared childhood, tree-climbing, bows and arrows, boxing, visiting the zoo. Nevertheless, Longley’s determination to commemorate his twin, with whom he shared “our gloomy womb-tangle” (‘The Feet’), re-confirms human closeness, allowance, the giving of space to others, to nature, is what has driven this poet’s work for more than forty years. 

Impressions of the TS Eliot Prize Readings 2025

martyn crucefix blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, Gay poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry competitions, poetry in performance, political poetry, post-colonial writing, religious poetry, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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)

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

martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, Romantic poetry, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

Left the two of them, hands held, then waving

before the groomed hedge. Both looked older

again, walking Wiltshire fields, where slopes

have browned and stained poppy-red in places

like a bloody graze across sun-burned knees:

a hurt from those days quickly soothed by Mum;

bragged up later to a great exploit for Dad.

The two of them . . .

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

                                        Absentminded,

my body alone has felt the pedals, held the wheel

as I’ve unearthed older and younger days

as precisely as those thumb-nail steps carved

in the solid encyclopedia I homeworked from,

perched at a desk on the edge of my bed.

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

I bolted knowledge then.

The cuckoo, beak biggest part of itself.

A schoolboy stealing coinage from lucid books,

laying instalments on a life of smart logic.

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

Now I drive through the fecundity of earth,

through these hectares of flowering potato,

white constellations adrift on undulating green,

with the conviction that this is a watershed:

x

so much of the talk at home is of death;

how do I brazen that out with an argument?

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

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

I’ve come to where jet-sprays of irrigation

relieve the cracked fields of hot midsummer.

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

burial place of that logical father,

whose stodgy book of rational commonsense,

sprung the tradition I’ve clung to long enough.

x

A laburnum sapling creaks in its rubber thong

at a stake, where I stalk the graveyard to find

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

yet surreptitiously, plotting false explanations

for myself as it’s the heart that says this

is a powerful place, where generations

of local good and ill in swathes

have gone down like centuries of grass.

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

But I forget what I’m here for.

Stood beside this body volume of displaced earth,

piled weeks ago beneath the trees –

on that last day some stranger’s beloved mother

had more flowers than she ever dreamed of.

x

The blown wreathes outstare me.

In a blink aside there’s more than I feared

of the two of them, wrapped against coming cold:

Dad, hands stuffed in his pockets,

standing off on his own; Mum, struggling

to peg out snapping shirtfuls of wind.

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

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

spray of the irrigator beside the church.

Its white angle above the potato fields

seems to crumple to a vaporous nothing, yet

a judder slams sudden clouds of fizzing spray.

It’s drenching some different sector of the field,

this drained, tearful, flowering place.

‘Muzzle’ – a new poem for the New Year

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, New British Poetry, poetry, political poetry, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

On the Writing of ‘Muzzle’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 2024

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


George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry

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’).