Lawrence Sail

Buy! New Christmas Poetry Anthology

martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, religious poetry, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Click here to buy your copies.

Perhaps it was in response to – really I mean a way of avoiding – the Tory party leadership campaign over the long hot summer of 2022 (and look how that turned out – and then again turned out…) that Michael Glover and I spent much of our time reading for, researching, inviting and selecting poems for a brand new poetry anthology with a focus on Christmas and the winter solstice. I know this is a bit obvious but – hey! – this might well be the solution to your up-coming Christmas gift buying deliberations – elegant, stimulating, moving, clever and very easy to wrap. That’s this new anthology. What’s not to like?

In fact, it was Michael’s original, bright idea and I was delighted to be asked to collaborate with him. It is the first anthology I have had a hand in editing and the book, in its final form, has two main sections – his bit and mine.

I found it daunting at first – where do you begin? Well, I don’t think I’m giving away any anthology-making secrets by mentioning that this Christmas collection is not the first on the market. I had a couple on my shelves already and the internet provides ready-made selections of possibilities and then less familiar collections like Enitharmon’s excellent Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems, eds. Kevin Crossley-Holland & Lawrence Sail (Enitharmon Press, 2005) and the rich seams of Seren’s Christmas in Wales, ed. Dewi Lewis (Seren Books, 1997) provoked thoughts and – with due acknowledgement – suggested some definite items. It was exciting when other contemporary poets were kind enough to agree to offer as yet unpublished work for the anthology – my thanks to Neil Curry, John Greening, Jeremy Hooker, Denise Saul, Joan Michelson, Penelope Shuttle and Marvin Thompson.

Penny Shuttle

For my own part, I pondered aspects of the ‘Christmas’ experience and came up with four loose categories: Mother and Child, Hearth and Home, Far and Near, Light and Sound.

Mother and Child was a fairly obvious place to start, and I was pleased to discover the 15th century poem ‘I syng of a mayden’ with its traditional take on the Nativity but its archaic and hence distanced and defamiliarized language. In contrast, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s plainly beautiful poem, ‘The Heart-in-Waiting’, revises the nativity story into more figurative terms for a contemporary audience: Christ is destined to be born into the human ‘heart-in-waiting’. WB Yeats’ take on the birth of Christ sees it from a quite different point of view: the pregnant mother’s sense of a divine love that ‘strikes a sudden chill into my bones / And bids my hair stand up’

Click here to buy your copies.

The thought of Hearth and Home, around the time of the winter solstice, was probably a more personal choice, partly a recollection of my own childhood but also of later Christmases with my own two children. In both cases I am lucky enough for these to be happy memories though this section is perhaps also about the great weight of expectation of happiness that the season brings with it. My own background is in West Country – people claim to still hear my old Wiltshire accent sometimes – so William Barnes’ boisterous ‘Chris’mas Invitation’ was a great find:

An’ ev’ry woone shall tell his teale,

An’ ev’ry woone shall zing his zong,

An’ ev’ry woone wull drink his eale

To love an’ frien’ship all night long.

Marvin Thompson

To follow this with Thomas Hardy’s more melancholic ‘The House of Hospitalities’ seemed right – with the latter’s reminiscing of warm logs on the fire, the food and songs of Christmas past, though now (this is Hardy after all) these are little more than ‘forms of old time’. I was very pleased to be able to include Joan Michelson’s touching evocation of Christmas under the 2020 Covid lockdown and Marvin Thompson’s densely allusive poem, ‘That’s the Art Deco Odeon on London’s Holloway Road’ neatly updates the memories of those of us of a certain background and vintage of watching Morecombe and Wise at Christmas with his more recent remembering of the family laughing at Lenny Henry’s character, Deakus.

Edward Thomas

The cluster of poems around Far and Near probably sprung out of the previous section – those expectations of the season are not fulfilled for all – loved ones, the rosy-cheeked messages of the time of year or indeed happiness itself may remain at a distance. So Edward Thomas’ gypsy plays ‘Over the hills and far away’ in a darkly troubling and less than traditionally Christian style, as something more ancient, ‘a rascally Bacchanal dance’. Kate Bingham’s, ‘Cento’, cleverly re-deploys phrases so familiar from Christmas hymns and songs and manages to be both questioningly ironic and touchingly empathetic. Beyond the tired commercial and religious cliches, the darkest time of the year, its turning point, makes us think of past and present, but also about other modes of being. Jeremy Hooker’s new poem sequence praises and reflects on the season’s natural world, the blackbird and owl, the snow falling and ‘bringing up / deeper silence / from some place one dreamed of / that was always there’

Francis Kilvert

The carolling, the candles, the Christmas tree lights: the grouping of Light and Sound also seemed to be very appropriate. Everybody, I’m sure, will feel the shock of recognition in John Mole’s brilliant poem about digging out the old Christmas tree lights from last year’s box of decorations: ‘dear tangled friends / With your plaited emerald flex / And familiar chime of chip-chink / Tumbling over my wrist’. The dancing, visionary lights described by the old Wiltshire man, John Bryant (huddled in his bed against the cold ‘like a marmot in its nest’), in a diary entry of 1874 by Francis Kilvert, are, he believes, the souls of ‘just men’. These ‘rhymed’ for me with the chilly stars in Nancy Campbell’s enigmatic new piece, ‘Lights’ as a desire, felt by some people, perhaps more of us in the depths of midwinter, ‘to lose themselves in beauty’. And what better way to end than with Tennyson’s poem from In Memoriam: having fought through grief and loss to come to some more noisily belling, optimistic, celebratory vision for the coming new year:

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

x

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Click here to buy your copies.

‘From Palette to Pen’ – a bit more ekphrasis

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, poetry, poetry workshops, teaching, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My blog post a couple of weeks ago on ekphrastic poems (ie. poems stimulated by visual art) proved to be one of the most popular I’ve ever written. This was in part the ‘how to’ aspect of the blog. In preparing to run a workshop at the Holburne Museum in Bath in February, 2017, I’d been reading a wide variety of poems derived in some fashion from the poet’s encounter with visual art and I tried to categorise the various approaches. I came up with 14: 

  1. Describe – and do no more.
  2. Describe but imagine beyond the frame
  3. Describe but incorporate researched materials
  4. Make Main Figure Speak – the most common approach
  5. Make Minor Figure/s Speak
  6. Make Objects Speak
  7. Make the Artist Speak
  8. Interrogation of the Artist
  9. Interrogation of illustrated Figure/s
  10. Interrogation of Yourself
  11. An Account of Your Encounter with the Art
  12. An Account of Gallery Visitors’ Experience
  13. An Account of Others’ Experience
  14. Come at a Tangent – the ekphrastic experience as after-thought or illustration

From-Palette-to-Pen-185x300

While at the Holburne Museum I was given their recent anthology of ekphrastic poems, From Palette to Pen, edited by Frances-Anne King in 2016. It contains 20 poems stimulated by art objects in the Holburne and as well as recommending it as a great resource for ekphrastic writing, I thought I’d use it to test my earlier analysis of the form to see if it held water.

It did pretty well. It goes without saying that all the poems engaged to some degree in method 1 – description of the art object itself. But beyond that, by far the commonest approach was method 4 – making the main figure speak. This was adopted by Anna-May Laugher, Claire Dyer, Carrie Etter, Frances-Anne King, Pascale Petit, Linda Saunders and Lesley Saunders. Petit manages to make Adam speak, remembering his naming of the animals; Claire Dyer makes Rosamund Sargent speak from her own portrait by Allan Ramsay; Lesley Saunders makes one of the sisters, Alicia and Jane Clarke, speak and so betray their “little sisterly difficulties”.

imgres

Another common approach was my method 8, an interrogation of the artist (without getting the artist to actually speak for themselves (method 7)). Jenny Lewis’ poem on a 17th century Rosewater basin began in this way, inquiring “What’s on his mind as he hammers / the silver, makes light flower”. Her poem goes on to incorporate some obvious research into the object too (my method 3) which takes her poem away from a narrow view into the colonial world of “London, the world, New England” in which it was made. David Hale, writing about Jan Asselyn’s ‘Landscape with Drover’ also imagines and interogates the artist’s approach, gazing at his own picture in process:

Ah, the south. He feels the heat of it

on his face and hands, smells dust, dung

and crushed thyme as he sips his coffee,

wonders again what the bull is looking at –

where time and life have gone.

imgres

I’d be tempted to widen this category of approach – or even introduce a new one – because several poems in the anthology interrogate the artist specifically about the artistic methods used to create the art object. Sue Boyle does this in detail about the making of Antonio Susini’s bronze figure, ‘Crouching Venus’: “Coated in plaster, lowered into fire, / she must be negated, melted from her mould”. There are also elements of this approach in the poems by Dawn Gorman and Phillip Gross, the latter dwelling as much on the making of a Beadwork Basket as on its illustrations of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza. Gill Learner’s poem also looks over the artist’s shoulder as he glazes a 15th century earthenware dish.

My method 9 – interrogating or engaging with one of the figures in the art work – was used by Caroline Heaton, Wendy Klein and Tim Liardet. Klein and Liardet both directly address figures in the image (for example, “Someone chose the best for you, Mary Bourchier” and “You let the baby grip his fingers”). Heaton’s engagement with Plura’s marble statue of ‘Diana and Endymion’ is a bit less direct, using the third person (rather than a second person address) to think herself into Diana’s state of mind:

Confined to the island

of the self, she laments

the chill of her lunar circuit,

its lonely eminence.

imgres

Rosie Jackson approached a piece of furniture, ‘The Witcombe Cabinet’, via a brief description of it but quickly developed thoughts about her own mother and indeed herself which I’d take to be my method 10 – using the art object to interrogate or enquire into one’s own life: “”My mother would have loved it here, / the roped off beauty […] But I ask questions of locked drawers”.

imgres

I think Claire Williamson mostly used method 3 – describe and make use of researched materials – in her poem on Thomas Barker’s painting of ‘Priscilla Jones’. The relationship between the sitter and the artist is the focus here, their romantic engagement and subsequent “passionless” marriage. In fact, I’ve not checked details of the painting/poem and I suppose it maybe that Williamson is making all this up – in which case she’s adopting method 2 – describe and imagine beyond the frame as George Szirtes does in anticipating the adult life of the boy in ‘Garton Orme at the Spinet’.

So the methods used in this anthology are fairly limited – seven of the fourteen I proposed. Those not adopted here are several varieties of ventriloquism (getting minor figures or objects to speak up; getting the artists to speak directly), the kinds of poem that more narratively describe encounters with art objects in a gallery or other location and a more tangential approach.

imgres

Finally, Lawrence Sail’s poem describes a Mantuan School ‘Female Head’ and is probably the ‘purest’ ekphrastic poem in the anthology in that it does little more than describe the image – method 1. However, Sail addresses the woman imaged as “Our lady of the liminal” and as such he breaches the borders (“offstage”) a fair bit, beginning to imagine beyond the frame to some degree (method 2). It’s a lovely poem and deserves quoting in full:

Female Head, about 1525

Our lady of the liminal –

witness at her back the margins of

the unruly forest,

and the focus of all her attention

being offstage.

 

But the heart of the story is locked

in the ghost of her gaze – its candour,

the early signs

of grief, a drift to the verge

where hope wavers.

 

And everywhere, time on the make –

in the darkening turquoise of the sky,

the slow swell

of the trees, the craquelure moving up

to infect her soft features.