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This is the third instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared inHurt(Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. The second three poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Penelope finds herself thinking about the island’s volcanic past and about the tourists who come to this modern version of Ithaca. What are they looking for? Odysseus has taken to reading Ibsen (of all writers) and questions his old attitudes to language, purpose, to the ‘things / laid open around him’. Telemachus, meanwhile, can only bitterly see reflections of himself in the island’s schoolchildren, even in the island’s desolate landscape.
fromEssays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
This is the first instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. In these 3 poems, Odysseus, now an old man, walks the Ithacan landscape in search of an old grave stele he recalls as presenting an heroic image of a young fighting man, only to find the passage of time has changed his view of it. Meanwhile, Telemachus is still searching for opportunities to prove his own idealistic, militaristic, heroism in service to a clear-cut purpose (that he has yet to discover). Penelope dreams (again) of her own childhood, her husband appearing suddenly as an eagle, intent on marrying her, changing her life forever.
fromEssays in Island Logic
‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’
I have been very poor with posting on here for a while. For which apologies. But here is an event you might like to attend if you are in the Chesham area this coming Sunday afternoon. It’s part of the Chesham Festival Fringe – and I’m reading with friend and ex-teaching colleague Valerie Jack. Follow the link below for more details. Entry is FREE. My plan is to read some Rilke in translation and some poems from my new Shearsman Books collection.
This review first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it.
As a female writer, talented in a variety of genres, living in a difficult political climate, Hungarian born Krisztina Tóth shares a good deal with Huch (my review of Tim Adès translation of Huch’s final book was posted here). Coming to the fore around the revolutionary year, 1989, Tóth has written poetry, children’s books, fiction, drama and musicals. My Secret Life (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) is her first sole author publication in English, ably translated and introduced by George Szirtes, presenting an overview of her poetry from 2001 to the present. Szirtes tells us that Tóth is no longer living in Hungary because of unbearable frictions with the Orbán regime. Like Huch she is drawn to poetry as personal expression, often to the formal elements of the art, both perhaps offering a redoubt against values she finds unacceptable. If there is little redemption to be found in her poems, there is some consolation to be had through the twin imperatives she expresses, to remain compassionate and to persist in trying to articulate human experience. Neither goal is easy.
Szirtes argues Tóth’s style is conversational, plain, precise, offering ‘a kind of kitchen-sink realism’. The personal also features and in these self-selected poems we get glimpses of a barely affectionate mother, a father who dies young, children, lovers, and a difficult grandmother. It’s not clear if these are genuinely autobiographical portraits and, anyway, they are most often absorbed into Tóth’s emblematic writing. An example would be ‘Barrier’ in which a couple are crossing a bridge, seemingly discussing ending their relationship. With the river below and trams thundering past, ‘the pavement was juddering’ and the poem is really about this instability in relationships as much as the (social/political) world, concluding there were ‘certain matters that couldn’t be finalised’. Such uncertainty drives roots even into the self: ‘I’m somebody else today or simply elsewhere’ (‘Send me a Smile’). Tóth uses the image of the ‘professional tourist’ in one of the major poems included here. With little background given, the narrator visits town after town, apparently hoping to be joined by a ‘you’ who never appears. Obviously a ‘stranger’, she wanders aimlessly, haplessly, buys a few things, the poem inconclusively ending with an image of a used toothbrush, ‘like an angry old punk, / its face turned to the tiles, / its white bristles stiff with paste’ (‘Tourist’).
Alienation, expressed through a profound sense of homelessness, is Tóth’s real subject. With the irony turned up to 11, the poem ‘Homeward’ ends quizzically, ‘But where’s home?’ In such a world view, the ability to remain compassionate is important to the poet, however hard it may be. The painfully brilliant ‘Dog’ presents a couple driving at night, seeing a badly injured dog at the roadside, and the woman wants the man to stop. I think they do, but the poem’s focus is on the powerful impetus to help versus the powerful sense that whatever can be done will prove futile. More weirdly, in ‘Duration’, the narrator finds a Mermaid Barbie doll stuck in the ground outside her flat. The childhood associations, the vulnerability of the frail figure, seem to compel action, but ‘what’?
Should I pull the thing out of the ground so it
sheds earth every night, because however often
we wash it, or wrap it in a tissue or leave it
on the radiator we’ll only have to bin it in the end?
Tóth’s wry, highly original lament, on deciding not to buy a universal plug adaptor, perhaps suggests what is being wished for in many of these poems. It is a way for a feeling human being to feel more at home in a world of suffering: ‘how to adapt the world / and its gizmos to the pounding of so many hearts’.
‘Song of the Secret Life’ pulls together many of these strands with the life as much the inner life of the self (the heart) as the life kept hidden in an unsympathetic personal or political environment. In the case of an artist, it is also the creative life, and as much ‘an utter mystery, a puzzle undone’, to the writer herself. But in order ‘to survive it needs telling’ and – like Huch’s creative figure in ‘The Poet’ – even if current conditions do not welcome such efforts, the individual must continue to write, to use language, to affirm the validity of the individual viewpoint. This is the burden of the magnificently hypnotic long concluding poem, ‘Rainy Summer’, in which the long-lined, rhymed couplets, express an unrelenting haunting of the speaker by ‘a sentence’. The latter phrase opens many of the lines, and it goes talking, throbbing, pulsing, dancing and rushing through the poem itself, though as much as the sentence might prove to be some sort of ‘home’ we are never told what it expresses. This is largely because it is a ‘rhythmic unit without words’, it is ‘the bodiless body of language’, it is the ‘speech that knows no speech’, it is ‘a sentence that contained you, gone yet here, some of each’.
Szirtes’ emphasis on the political backdrop to Tóth’s poems might lead us to expect more obvious political engagement and subject matter. That’s not what we get here, though no doubt her surroundings have determined many aspects of the work. Hers is a profound voice, finding in the menace, alienation, and instability around her emblems of more universally shared experiences of rootlessness, troubled self-questioning, of sensibilities that find the world as it is a painful and difficult place to navigate, of the pull of pity and compassion versus an overwhelming sense of the futility of individual action. ‘Sleeper’ addresses what might be a transmigrating soul or spirit, a ‘little pulse box’, asking question after question about where it has been, what it has seen, the mysterious passage from life to death, or vice versa: ‘what’s it like to step into such cold, unlit fiefdoms, / does anything remain’? Tóth’s poems ask such questions and like the best modern poems offer us equivocal answers only, consolatory but not redemptive.
Here is the whole of one poem included here:
Where – Kristina Toth, tr. George Szirtes
Not there, on the tight bend of the paved highway,
where cars are occasionally prone to skidding,
chiefly in winter, though no one dies there,
x
not there where streets are greener and leafier
where lawns are mowed and there’s a dog in the garden
and the head of the family gets home late at night,
x
nor there in front of the school where every morning
a man is waiting regular as clockwork,
nor inside the gates on the concrete playground,
x
nor in the neglected, dehydrated meadow
where a discarded dog-end hits the ground and glows
A little flock of reading dates – replacing the swifts that have left our skies recently – have gathered themselves into something that almost resembles a brief Autumn Reading Tour. Admittedly, not going too far beyond the Greater London area – but to Maidstone and (briefly) Winchester – but of course I’m very happy to be granted these opportunities to read my work. Live links to these events are provided in the details below. And, as you’ll see from the details below, the chance to read with some really talented, inventive and entertaining poets along the way. In particular, I’ll be launching my new chapbook of poems – Walking Away – published by Paul O’Prey’s excellent Dare-Gale Press. If you are in any of the vicinities mentioned – I’d be delighted to see you there – Martyn
Wednesday 10th September– 8pm @ Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution, 11 South Grove, London N6 6BS – reading w/ Tim Ades and Maggie Brookes-Butt. HLSI Fundraising Event: Tickets £10 https://hlsi.org.uk/whats-on/poetry-please/
Saturday 25th October – 1pm @ The Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion St, London WC1R 4RL reading w/ David Harsent. Free Event. This is a Dare-Gale Press reading, launching my chapbook which they are publishing: Walking Away. Free Event: https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/
And on the SAME DAY I’ll be second launching the chapbook Walking Away…
Saturday 25th October – 7pm @ The Ship Poetry Reading Series, organised by Chris Beckett, 134 New Cavendish St. London W1W 6YB – reading w/ Barbara Cumbers, Jack Cooper, Anthony Joseph, + Fawzia Muradali Kane: £5 https://www.chrisbeckettpoems.com/news.html
An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it.
It is as a poet writing in Gaelic that MacNeacail – who died in 2022 – is most well-known, though he would himself provide translations of his work into English, what, in the poem ‘last night’, he refers to as Gaelic’s ‘sister tongue’. There were also poems written in Scots and these variants give an insight into what Colin Bramwell here calls ‘the language situation in Scotland’ within which MacNeacail worked all his life. For a number of years, MacNeacail lived and wrote under the anglicised name Angus Nicolson, but always considered himself a tri-lingualist and antagonistic to the kind of divisiveness such a ‘situation’ might give rise to. His natural inclination was democratic, pacifist, anti-authoritarian, and modernist. Now, the collection, beyond (eds. Colin Bramwell with Gerda Stevenson (Shearsman Books, 2024)) gives readers a selection of poems written in English by Aonghas MacNeacail over the past 30 years. One of the implications of the book’s title is his deeply held wish to look ‘beyond’ division, not to anything transcendental (MacNeacail’s focus was always this world, not some other), but to the next term in an on-going dialectical process. One of the little gems from ‘the notebook’, included here, imagines a cup of knowledge, the liquor within, also knowledge, a grain is added and stirred, and the grain then consumes the liquor and continues to ‘grow, root, sprout / find elbows, crack the cup // find clay’.
MacNeacail’s modernism took its key lessons from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Olson, and Creeley and most of the poems here have that fluid, unpunctuated (hence pointed by the breath), often short lined, often indented formal shape we associate with the Black Mountain. He was a member of one of Phillip Hobsbaum’s fertile ‘groups’ (along with Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard) and the advice given was to go back to his roots, to ‘write about what you know’. In part, this took MacNeacail back to his childhood, growing up in Uig, on the Isle of Skye, speaking only Gaelic. It also made it clear what he wanted to escape from: Gerda Stevenson describes this as ‘the confines of the proscriptive Free Church of Scotland’. Several childhood poems, illustrate the stifling force of religion, on his mother, for example, ‘strapped down tightly / by a darkly warding book thick with orders that drove / and hedged her way’ (‘missing’). The church governed education too, the teacher little more than a ‘stern presence’, who demanded ‘psalms / from memory’ (‘crofter, not’).
The teacher’s ‘granite eye’ also features in ‘forbidden fruit’ where the contrast is between education’s confining ‘barbed-wire’ and the invitations of the natural world (of Skye), specifically the allure of ‘the biggest [. . .] sweetest’ nut hanging on a branch over a waterfall. The poem ‘had adam not eaten the apple’ feels like a later piece, with a more self-confident, liberated MacNeacail declaring ‘the thing is / not to always / spell the word correctly’ and imagining god’s demands for eternal perfection leading him to waken every morning, complaining ‘another fucking immaculate day’. A longer poem like ‘gaudy jane’ gives a sense of MacNeacail’s unshackling from restrictions. The figure addressed is part woman, part a realm of liberation, a window onto ‘wild excursions’, towards ‘dancing voices, laughing feet’, she is a glass of whisky, a doorway into nature, to sensuality, and a way to access the ‘little gods of mischief and delight’. Celebrations of the natural landscapes of Skye (and elsewhere) in fact become one of the characteristics of MacNeacail’s writing. Snowfall over hills is as if ‘god’s apron / settles on our field and makes / a tranquil bowl’ (‘snowhere’). In ‘a rainbow’, the natural phenomenon is enjoyed and admired, ‘so real // high up on that pentland slope’, its natural beauty preferred to any fanciful talk of pots of gold, its fleetingness an image of imagination and memory. MacNeacail’s ‘primula scottica at yesnaby’ celebrates the rare wildflower’s fragile beauty, its hardy nature, till it also becomes an image of Scotland itself: ‘the air it breathes is stiff with brine / this whit of life still flowers / every tiny purple radiance is lambent / in the blood of time’.
MacNeacail’s love of Nature is matched only by his writing on the varieties of human love, erotic, romantic, filial, parental, between friends. I can’t think of any other poet who’d compose 80 lines (both touching and hilarious) in praise of ‘some of my best friends’. A poem like ‘love in the moonlight’ is unashamedly romantic in its contrasting of the moon’s ‘pallor’ with the loved one’s ‘sun- / wrapped noons, bright mornings / and the way your evenings / dance into a fiery dusk’. There are several delicate poems featuring MacNeacail’s daughter, Galina, and – reminiscent of Courbet’s ‘The Origin of the World’ painting – ‘the curious eternal’ is a marvellous erotically-charged paean to a loved one, ‘after all those years / the mystery / of flesh, secretions, pulse and breathing patterns’. MacNeacail’s English poems exude a human warmth that, to judge from comments from friends and colleagues, was true to the man himself. They are driven by his wish to communicate – in whatever language, in truth – and his slipping free from Christianity’s ‘one book’, that would ‘consign all art and ingenuity / to black irrelevance’ (‘this land is your land’), allowed him to celebrate the flawed, the not perfectly straight, the interrupted conversations, that constitute being human with a passion and modesty. These lines from ‘the notebook’, are a characteristic, and invaluable, vade mecum: ‘no matter / how little / you say / it may / be worth / the saying, if it / touches the edge / of a shadow / that can / (possibly) / be thinned / by the breath / of words’.
Following on from the publication in January 2025 of my translation of ‘Dressel’s Garden’, one of Jürgen Becker’s longer poems (which recently appeared on the USA site Asymptote Journal), three more poems by this fascinating German poet have just appeared in Shearsman magazine and our hope is (permissions permitting etc) that Shearsman Books will be publishing a full collection of his work in the near future. All these poems are taken from Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. The newly published poems are relatively brief so I thought I’d post two them here with a little bit of literary and historical context. (I’ll comment in a later post on the longest of the three poems now published by Shearsman).
In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Collected Poems (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’ Likewise, in their adjudication, the 2014 Büchner Prize jury highlighted the way ‘Becker’s writing is interwoven with the times, with what is observed and what is remembered, what is personal and what is historical.’ Jürgen Becker’s own personal journey began on July 10, 1932, on Strundener Strasse, in Cologne. In August 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war, his father was transferred from his place of work in Cologne to Erfurt in Central Germany. This was the beginning of the seven-year-old Becker’s experience of war and a post-war childhood in Thuringia. In 1947, the family left Erfurt and returned to West Germany. Becker has said about this period that there was never any thought of wanting to travel to the Eastern zone, let alone to the GDR, to see the places and landscapes where he’d spent his childhood years: ‘For a long time, I oriented myself solely towards western horizons; I lived, so to speak, with my back to the GDR; my childhood was separated by a border, seemingly closed’. (More of borders in a moment).
Becker’s interest in ‘events’ – political and historical – can clearly be seen in the short poem ‘Reporter’. Its subject never seems to become outdated (as I write this, Turkey is enforcing a crackdown on reporting – see the arrest and deportation of BBC reporter, Mark Lowen, very recently). Becker’s poem is not set in any particular time period, though the allusion to a ‘vast thing, fading away’ suggests an epoch of great change, one political system fading, another on the rise. I love the journalist’s reported observation that he ‘can only leave / when nothing else happens’. In Becker’s writing, there is always something else arising (history does not stop happening – as we see in this particularly fast-moving historical moment). I take the implication of the final 4 words to suggest that the reporter may well be ‘removed’ by the authorities from whatever the situation currently is (against his wishes by the sound of it) and that we will all become the poorer for that, more poorly informed, less capable of distinguishing the truth of things: ‘He will be missed’.
The second poem, ‘Meanwhile in the Ore Mountains’, bears strong similarities in that the specific time period (though not the setting) is left deliberately vague, though so many of the details in the poem possess a terrific (terrifying?) resonance for our own times. As to place, the Ore Mountains lie along the Czech-German border and borders are important in this poem. As I mentioned above, Becker was born in the eastern region of Germany, but from age 7, he was brought up in West Germany, and after the fall of the Wall in 1990, he’d often return to his (eastern) childhood landscape. The resulting blending of a child’s and adult’s vision is what gives rise to Becker’s characteristic poetic mode: a flickering between past and present, often without clear signalling, the past frequently haunted by the disturbing changes that happened in Germany in the 1930s. I’ll post the original German of this poem as well, as in what follows I’ll make a few observations about translation.
Though relatively brief, this poem is just one sentence, woven together with the conjunction ‘wie’ (translated here both as ‘how’ and ‘the way’). The weave is dense and as I’ve suggested it’s not really possible to tell whether what is observed – the children, the oil spill, the tree stump (resembling a body) – are contemporaneous or from different eras. My translation keeps these possibilities open: borders here are felt to be temporal, as well as geographical. The German word ‘Avantgarde’ has artistic as well as political implications, but my choice of ‘vanguard’ also brings out the militaristic connotations which are reinforced by the ‘spitzen, grünen Lanzen’ (‘sharp, green spears’) which are then swiftly transformed into a bunch of sprouting snowdrops. These flowers of Spring are interestingly referred to as a ‘Konvention’ and I retained the English equivalent, intending to suggest both a performance (something conventional, perhaps not genuine), as well as a political gathering or agreement (like the Convention on Human Rights). The ambiguity felt very relevant (and once again topical).
The final vivid, visual images – a TV screen observed through a window, a script on the screen, a woman talking, but she is inaudible to the observer – sum up Becker’s concerns about the media, political and historical change, borders real and imagined, exclusion, and the need to ask questions of those in power. Issues as real today as when the poem was written in the early 1990s.
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.
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)
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,
